Carry On Gemma

The absolute worst thing happened to me on the 24th July this year.  My mum died.   She was in hospital for just over a week and then she was...gone.  She passed peacefully at 6am.  It was sunny, she was in no pain and no distress.  I would have wanted it no other way, of course.  She'd gone into hospital for IV antibiotics and was fully expected to return home within four days but she stopped responding to them for some reason.   This is not my first experience of grief.  I have no grandparents, haven't for a long time, and each of their deaths hit me hard.  Losing my mother though, well it's taking all the grief I had with all my grandparents rolled into one and multiplying it by a million - that's how it feels. In reality though, I have no idea how to feel.  I don't appear to be doing the stages of grief properly.  Some days I have all of then one after the other and in no particular order.  Other days I have some ...

So I wrote last week about Greg Wallace and this week we have John Torode saying complaints about him using racist language were upheld. The BBC then sacked him.  Fine. Then we have the reports saying he was just singing along with a song that had the N**** word in it.  Well, I have no issue with that because it a lyric in a song.   Oh wait, there is  an issue with that because he's not black. It's still a lyric in a song though and John Torode can sing it like I can, if I want (I don't because that isn't my music). So, I felt like sticking up for him at that point. Yet it seems he's used it to another member of staff and it's one of nine complaints upheld against him. Yet again, the BBC.

 One of my favourite things about my weekly trips to Tesco in the last few weeks has been the air conditioning.  I have a few physical problems at the moment and being in there with the air con and being able to sit on a bench inside the store and pack my bags in the cool air has helped me a lot in recent weeks.  I'm not the only one who uses these benches, elderly and infirm, people waiting on someone else, people just taking a moment after shopping before they have to go home and unpack it all and put it away. Friday morning I trot to my Tesco supermarket for my shop.  I wasn't in the mood for it today, too hot, too much else going on.  However, the air con chilled me out (ha) so I dragged myself around with my trolley and shopping list and went to the checkout and piled my shopping onto the travelator.  I waited because the man in front of me was taking his time fluffing out his bags for life. I'd have had patience if he had been elderly or in need of so...

I don't really consider mental health as any sort of excuse for committing a crime.  I have suffered poor mental health for over twenty years and I have never used it as an excuse for anything, never mind trying to push away allegations of being a dirty bastard by saying I'm autistic.  Yet this is exactly what Gregg Wallace is trying to do now. Now that the BBC no longer wants to fund him because of his behaviour, he's blaming it on being autistic.  As if he thinks that thousands of autistic people are going to come out and say 'yes Gregg, we forgive you because being autistic is an excuse for being a pervy bastard.' It is not.  And neither is any form of mental health he might want to come up with.  He is a "wrong'un" and that terminology crosses all dialectics across the UK.   This guy has tried to turn his perverted behaviour into something that he thinks should be considered normal because he said he couldn't wear tight underwear.  I'm not ...

Now, before you start off thinking that you've come across a debauchery site I can assure you, you have not.   You've come across me and my disdain about charities begging for help.  This disdain doesn't extend to all charities.  Every local charity needs your help and you should do that.  You should buy the raffle tickets or donate the prizes and help all local people make their lives better. My ire is charities like Unicef. The absolute charity muggers I absolutely drew the line at donating to them a long time ago.  At first it was because they paid their CEO's too much compared to what people needed.   Now it's just because I won't be told by overpaid millionaires how to spend my average monthly salary,  Let's take SoccerAid as an example. Lots of ex-players and celebs running around, England v The rest of the world with millionaires standing by in the breaks to tell the viewers to donate £20, £30, £40 by texting the amount to a number....

Back in 2016 I rented a wonderful 2 bed flat for £695 PCM with a deposit of £695.  It was part furnished with cheap IKEA sofas (no fire regs on them though), a rickety dining table and four chairs and two single beds in the back bedroom.  In the main bedroom I asked them to remove the Ikea bed and mattress there as I brought my own. They got people to remove the bed and then I had to point out that I didn't want the old stained mattress either and why wouldn't they have just removed it? They provided wardrobes, bedside drawers and two chests of drawers. I put in a new double bed, new corner sofa (well, bought from my pal who had hardy used it), desk and chair, a new bookshelf and new lamps, uplighters and bedside lamps.  I put in a lot of work to that flat.   Then I had to leave it, three years after I moved in.  I could only take simple things like TV, PC, etc.  I couldn't take my bigger assets and they were left with the owner.  I tried to get t...

 My dad went for some blood tests recently and they came back normal.  Then he had to repeat them and some came back not normal and those were for his prostate.  He'd had an episode where he had needed a pee in the house and not made it.  The doctor has pointed out it could just be a bladder infection that the blood tests wouldn't pick up on.  In fact, this appears to be fairly common.  He told me on Friday.  He started off with a quip about wanting his parents picture visible to him in death.  Then went on to say he'd been thinking about it since the doctor had mentioned it. The doctor pointing out that it might just be a bladder infection doesn't phase me, neither does him preparing my dad for something worse.  My dad isn't an idiot and he knows what men his age can end up suffering from.   I'm okay, I'm robust.  I always have been and have to be since my sister took a back seat running down south in the pandemic and not comi...

The world is in turmoil at the moment and no one could imagine anything worse happening that would beat war, but it did. Lynx announced the discontinuation of Lynx Africa, the scent that defined the mid-to-late-nineteen-nineties in the UK. Rylan speaks for a generation Cue the meltdown of a generation.   'It must be an April Fool!' Many cried in the hope that the marketing committee had been overcome by the scent that they just couldn't wait and had gone early. Alas, no.  Not an early April Fool.   Just a marketing campaign.  It's not gone, it's just getting a makeover.

It is only Wednesday of this week and already I have see too many videos of children having fights.  I say "fights" but that would indicate that there was a degree of fairness amongst those who are seen in the videos as "fighting".  Usually it's one person being physically assaulted by one or more other individual.  That person, twice this week, has been female.  One lone female being battered silly while others look on and watch and film. Sadder than that is that in one of those videos this week it is understood that the female being beaten up was actually a child who was eight-years-old and, if the information with the video is correct, the girls giving the beaten was older, in high school at least.  What sort of beef does an eleven-year-old girl have with an eight-year-old girl? Thankfully, in the that video, there was someone, a young lad, trying to step in.  The video is not long and the child is okay physically but extremely shaken up as you can imagi...

No, it's not a pre-planned April Fool, it is in fact the case that as of April this year, Scotrail will be increasing their fares by 3.8%.  This is across the board including their travel passes. This might not seem entirely off the rails as a single increase, however, last April, 2024, Scotrail increased their fares by 8.7%. Ooof,  they must have thought when they got around the table to discuss how to squeeze the public further, 3.8% will seen like nothing compared to 8.7% therefore everyone will accept it. The thing is, the public are getting to the point where they cannot afford it.   At the moment it costs £369.80 for a season card...that only takes you between Glasgow and Edinburgh on 5 days each week.  That is with  a discount.  It's also going up on April the 1st. Fiona Hyslop, secretary for Transport said that the hikes were unwelcome but felt that they were needed to keep rail travel attractive and...well...affordable. I read by that logic th...

 As a country we're not very good at taking weather warnings seriously.  After the red warning was sent out I saw numerous posts saying things like "it's just a wee bit wind" or "it'll blow itself out quickly". Yet this time, Storm Eowyn, packed a bit of a punch.  I've lived in the same area all my life having had no desire to move away from it.  I have never seen the damage from a storm like I have today.  Trees down, one lying across a street just around the corner from me, in another street a huge branch came off a tree and went through the back window of a car (no one in it, thankfully).  A chimney came off a roof nearby which was actually one of the better looking ones in the street. In the local park there are trees down everywhere and some work that was getting done has been completely destroyed meaning the workers will have to start over.  Across the country Eowyn has brought down roofs and buildings and numerous fences. Of course though, peo...

While going about my business on Thursday I had the TV on in the background with an eye on the sentencing of the entirely evil Axel Rudakubana.   If you don't know who that is, he stabbed to death three children in Stockport in July 2024. Those three children were all girls attending a Taylor Swift dance party. Alice da Silva Aguiar - aged 9 Bebe King - aged 6 Elsie Dot Stancombe - aged 7 Just three little girls excited about going to party themed around their favourite singer.  Their lives ended when Rudakubana entered the room and started to stab everyone around him.  He murdered those three little girls and injured many others. The entire nation was stunned by this attack.  These were just little girls out having some fun.  Why were they attacked? Axel Rudakubana was arrested and charged.  He was seventeen-years-old and should have been on watch lists but, thanks to failures from multiple agencies from Prevent, the police, the government and more, h...

Hello reader.  Here we go for another relaunch of "A Little Bit of it All". A bit of background: I have been writing a blog on and off for almost 20 years now.  This comes, simply, because I love to write.  I love to get my thoughts and opinions down on a variety of different subjects, hence the title of the blog which I have used for over a decade now at least. After letting it slide for a couple of years now I have decided to pump some life back into it.  Well, try anyway. I went back to Wordpress, being that's where I hosted it before - no can do.  I have my own domain name but it won't let me hook it up to the site without a fee - same with Wix.  So, I have decided to go back to basics with Blogger.   After all, it's the words that count.