I have taken two weeks off work. I cannot afford to go abroad on holiday so I have decided to chance my summer break in the British wilderness.
I have never been a gambler, and it shows. The first week of my holiday is almost over, and what a miserable "summer" break it has been so far: on five of the six days of my annual leave so far it has rained, and today's rain has been literally non-stop, from sunrise to this moment right now. It's grey, miserable, cold, wet. In other words, it's the British wilderness in its purest form.
It's the middle of summer and I am wearing a coat while watching television. The central heating is on. The TV is full of rubbish – all 30-plus channels on my Freeview and Top Up TV full of a mixture of repeats and the worst mediocrity that the English-speaking world can come up with.
Now and again, on the BBC's rolling news channel, imaginatively called BBC News, trailers pop up with reference to the BBC's "excellence". What a joke! A sick joke – not only making do with the knowledge that they are producing rubbish, but having the arrogance repeatedly to congratulate themselves on utter crap redefined as "excellence". Another example of the best of the British wilderness.
Be that as it may, as always, I reserve my curses for the folk back home: the people and their rulers who have given me no option but to put up with this grey no-man's land.
