Brassed Off

FULL marks to Tiscali's, presumably off-shored, technical services. A very helpful Asian gentleman spent nearly an hour on the telephone with me yesterday evening helping me to get my wireless broadband sorted.

And once I was sorted, which messed up Tina's connection, he then spent another ten minutes getting that sorted.
It was an efficient and polite service, I wish it could have been a call centre here in Britain and manned by British technical staff, but as it wasn't I have to be grateful for the gentleman from Mumbai for getting me back on line.

Yesterday, on the main website, I posted a story of a miner who had written to Freedom about the coal industry. That prompted me to watch one of my all time favourite films, Brassed Off, late last night. It captures the hopelessness of the battle to save our pits from Thatcher's henchmen and none more so than in this musical extract which I found on YouTube this morning.

There's an important AC meeting this weekend so I have to work on a report from Freedom. There might be changes a foot, as I have mentioned in an earlier post, but more will be known after the meeting. My first Freedom was in June 2002 and that was No. 27. Now I am working on issue No 98. It's a fair number of newspapers and there have been few months missed - just a couple of Decembers and once when I was away Summer ski-ing on the Hintertux glacier in Austria and a rush issue had to be got out after the BBC's Secret Agent programme.

A final story today on 'racism' and its perception. A 'left-wing' friend of mine has fallen out with the wife of another 'left-wing' friend of mine because of perceived racism. Now before you think it might be something to do with any association with me, I can assure you that this isn't the case. No, they have fallen out over Israel and the comments the former made which were critical of that country's treatment of the Palestinians. Apparently now, in some left-wing circles at least, criticism of Israel is tantamount to being 'racist', which just goes to show what a brilliant job the Zionist lobby has done in stifling criticism against what is, without a doubt, the most 'racist' country in the world today.