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What is it with old people and loose change?

A weekly column reproduced from the Bristol Evening Post


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Dateline Afghanistan, and Our Boys go in. Unfortunately, they’re three Muslims from Luton fighting for the Taliban, rather than the Royal Marines fighting for the Forces of Blah.

Why on earth we put up with this nonsense, I don’t know. Would we have put up with Nazis recruiting on the streets of Chipping Sodbury in 1941? I don’t think so.

So why do we stand by and watch as English-born Taliban supporters sign up young Muslims for the Third Milton Keynes Mujahadin? It baffles me. Maybe someone from the Guardian could enlighten us.

Meanwhile Mr Bush and Mr Blah play a particularly cruel April Fool’s joke on the people of Afghanistan by alternately dropping food parcels and cluster bombs which are both in yellow containers. Outstanding work! So how hungry are you, punk?

And Osama bin Laden sits in his Christmas Grotto watching Men Behaving Jihadly and manipulating the national media in a way that Alistair Campbell, NuLabour’s head of Thought Police, can only marvel at.

Now we’re even broadcasting to them, via the BBC World Service, their own Taliban-approved version of The Archers – a radio soap called New Home, New Life containing characters based on Ambridge favourites.

One just hopes that this Anglo-Afghan adaptation works one way only. Imagine the fuss in The Bull if Eddie Grundy got his leg blown off by a stray land mine, or if an errant cruise missile wiped out Ruth Archer. On second thoughts …

As ever, I have a solution to this world crisis. Afghanistan currently supplies 90 per cent of the heroin sold on Britain’s streets. By announcing that they’re going to make cannabis a Class C drug, NuLabour has just created a huge market for that particular product.

So let’s persuade the Afghans to grow cannabis instead of heroin and everyone’s happy. Britain gets a top quality crop of Afghan Black while the Taliban end up too stoned to fight. That’s what I call a result. Get to it, Tone.


What is it with old people and loose change? Virtually every lengthy queue you end up in these days turns out to be caused by one old lady scrabbling about in her purse for some loose change. Surely they must have got used to decimalisation by now?

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