Editing and generally tidying up...

Having read a significant proportion of my 'back catalogue' over the past week or so, I decided to remove some of the dead wood from the archives.

As some of you may have found yourself, once you start pruning, it's difficult to know where to stop, particularly when, like me, you are your own fiercest critic.

Consequently, with that somewhat time-consuming work still in progress, new posts will be a little thin on the ground for the next few days.

Football predictions...How did I do?

As promised (or should that be threatened) in my two previous posts, it's time to examine my ability as a football pundit, by comparing the predictions I made in August as to where each of the clubs in the English Premier League would find themselves at the end of the season with where they actually found themselves.

Reproduced below are the final league placings and alongside them in red, what I had predicted:

1. Manchester United (Man United)
2. Liverpool (Chelsea)
3. Chelsea (Arsenal)
4. Arsenal (Liverpool)

5. Everton (Everton)
6. Aston Villa (Aston Villa)
7. Fulham (Portsmouth)
8. Spurs (Spurs)
9. West Ham (Sunderland)
10. Manchester City (Newcastle)
11. Wigan (Man City)
12. Stoke (West Ham)
13. Bolton (Blackburn)
14. Portsmouth (Wigan)
15. Blackburn (Bolton)
16. Sunderland (Fulham)
17. Hull (Boro)

18. Newcastle (West Brom)
19. Middlesborough (Stoke)
20. West Brom (Hull)

Well, starting with the good points, I got four out of the top eight in exactly the right position, and - allowing myself a little latitude - correctly identified seven of the clubs occupying the top eight places, with only a now rather eccentric choice of Portsmouth to finish seventh spoiling my set.

Not bad.

But before get too carried away, let's go to the opposite end of the table. Of the three clubs I tipped for the drop, only one, West Brom, was actually relegated and even then, I got their position wrong. And whilst I'm pointing out inaccuracies, I also predicted that the Baggies would be joined in the Championship next season by Stoke City, who finished a very creditable twelfth, eleven points above the relegation zone and Hull City, who survived by the skin of their teeth and one incredibly precious point.

I also have to concede that as late as the day before yesterday, I predicted that Newcastle would stay up (oh dear) at Hull's expense.

Wrong again!

Other than that, I significantly overestimated how Sunderland would fare, suggesting that they would finish ninth, whereas, of course, they were still sweating profusely on the last day of the season.

Those glaring errors aside, I think I can accurately categorise the remainder of my predictions as being 'right desert, wrong tent', missing a number of bulls' eyes by one or two places.

In fact, I actually got more of my predictions spot on than the Daily Mail's Neil Ashton, who's article prompted me to consult the Throne's murky crystal ball in the first place. He only hit the spot with two suggestions, one of which was Manchester United, which, forgive the observation, but a blind man on a galloping horse could have foreseen.

Still, I'd better not give up the day job...

Those of you not as keen on football as I am will doubtless be pleased to read - if indeed you are still reading - that there will be no more posts on the subjct until next August, when I repeat this exercise for the season 2009-2010.

Oh goody! I hear you all cry...

Well done, Burnley...

As promised on Saturday evening, I'll be writing a longer football related post later on, but it would be remiss of me to fail to offer my congratulations to Burnley Football Club on their promotion to the Premier League, having beaten Sheffield United 1 - 0 at Wembley.

Having been by far the better side for the full ninety minutes, no-one but the most myopic Sheffield United fan could argue that Burnley didn't deserve their success on today's evidence.

So eight Lancashire clubs in next season's Premier League it is, then; there'll be a local derby every other week!

All we need now is for Preston North End to come up next season...

The Premier League denouement...

As I type these words at shortly after 9.15 on Saturday evening, those of you familiar with the world of English football will know that the next forty-eight hours will be the most exciting – and nerve-racking - of the season for the players and supporters of six clubs.

I say six, because after the nerve-shredding tension of the battle to stave off relegation is played out on Sunday afternoon, during which two of Sunderland, Hull City (who started the season with such promise), Newcastle United and Middlesborough will fall through the trap door into the relative oblivion of the Championship, comes the play-off final for promotion to the untold wealth of the Premier League.

Turning first to the battle to avoid relegation, it would appear that barring an entirely unlikely set of freak results, in which they would have to win, whilst all the others lost and in the process make up a deficit of five in terms of their goal difference, Middlesborough will be plying their trade in the second tier of English football next year.

So far so predictable.

But then comes the battle between the remaining three clubs, Sunderland, Hull and Newcastle to avoid the final berth on football’s Titanic. Whichever one of them eventually hits the iceberg, it will be a dark day for football in the north east, because all three of the combatants are from that part of the country. Yes, I know that when people refer to the north east, they are generally speaking about an area starting in Newcastle and ranging as far south as Middlesborough, but on what reading of geography is the city of Hull not in the north east of England?

For what it’s worth, gazing into the Throne’s rather murky crystal ball, I think that Newcastle and Sunderland will escape the drop by the skin of their teeth, whilst Hull will join Middlesborough and West Bromwich Albion on the unwanted journey south.

Meanwhile, on Monday afternoon, a game of at least equal, if not greater, importance will kick off at 4.00pm at Wembley.

That match is, of course, the Championship play-off final between Sheffield United and Burnley, with the victors securing a place in next season’s Premier League and with it the trifling matter of £50 million pounds or so of television money.

Living where I do, I know a good many Burnley supporters (more just recently than ever before; I wonder why…) and contrary to popular belief, very few of them eat bananas with their feet.

Interestingly, if Burnley are successful, they will become the eighth Lancashire club in the Premier League (0r 40% of its membership), joining near neighbours Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Wigan Athletic and the two Manchester and Liverpool clubs in the elite of English football.

What a contrast those riches would be in comparison to the footballing wilderness which is Yorkshire and the north east of England in general.

Fortunately, I will be watching all of those issues unravel as a neutral, but I dare say, having seen my club in both relegation danger and in the play-offs in previous years, that nerves are jangling tonight in those six towns and cities in northern England.

On a slightly different tack, those of you with longer memories may remember that on 12th August last year, I posted an item in which I predicted the way the Premier League table would look at the end of the season.

On Monday, I propose to hold my pundit status up to ridicule by comparing my predictions with what actually happened.
I can hear the gales of laughter already…

The prosecution of Ali Dizaei: a game of high stakes

I see that the CPS has decided to prosecute Commander Ali Dizaei for offences of perverting the course of justice and misconduct in a public office, arising out of an incident which occurred last autumn outside a London restaurant, during which he had arrested a man on what were, allegedly, trumped up charges.

Regular readers will be familiar with the stance adopted by the Throne in respect of those charged with criminal offences: all of them - whoever they are, however famous, or even notorious -are entitled to the presumption of innocence until such time that their guilt - if such is the finding of the court - is established beyond reasonable doubt. This, of course extends to Mr Dizaei every bit as much as it did to Steven Gerrard, about whom I wrote when he was arrested and charged with offences earlier this year.

As such, and with the matter now sub-judice, I do not propose to offer any further comment on the case itself; but there are one or two issues arising from it which do merit further discussion.

Firstly, I am sure that the decision to prosecute such a high profile individual - Dizaei is both the President and legal advisor to the openly activist Black Police Association, and as a Metropolitan Police Commander one of the most senior police officers in the country - was not taken lightly. Indeed, I'm absolutely sure that the lawyer responsible for deciding in favour of his prosecution, Gaon Hart, will have agonised over it endlessly. Only time and due process will show whether that decision was justified and we must await the final result of the prosecution to make that assessment.

Secondly, if I were Nick Hardwick, the Chair(man) of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), I would have sought the most cast-iron assurances possible from the team which investigated the case against Dizaei that they had left no stone unturned in their search for evidence. Because, and make no mistake about it, if the IPCC investigation comes up short, the resulting enquiry will be very uncomfortable indeed for Hardwick, who might even find his position untenable if the enquiry is severely criticised.

Thirdly, of course, this is a high-stakes case for the Metropolitan Police; a fact which will not have been lost on its Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson and the entirety of his command team, because not only was Dizaei acquitted the last time the Met investigated him, but as a consequnce of that acquittal, they agreed to pay him several tens of thousands of pounds and promote him to the rank of Chief Superintendent in order to persuade him not to sue them and to smooth his way back into the force.

If he were to be acquitted a second time, I shudder to think what the settlement 'price' would be; I just hope Her Majesty the Queen is still enjoying her normal, robust good health at the time, or his eyes might even alight on her position.

More seriously, though, I'm sure that the attitude of the BPA, as expressed by Alfred John, the Chair(man) of the London branch, who described the decision to prosecute Dizaei as 'outrageous' and 'the result of personal vendettas' is already causing Sir Paul more than a little concern, for reasons so obvious that I needn't waste my time by recording them here.

All in all, then, a game of high stakes for all involved; from Dizaei himself, who will face professional ruin if convicted, to the IPCC and CPS, who will face severe (and potentially career-ending) criticism if their work is found to be of a less than excellent standard and to the BPA which faces the potential embarrassment of the conviction of a man who is not only their national president and legal advisor, but in many ways the 'face' of their organisation and finally, the Metropolitan Police who will have a significant issue on their hands, whatever the verdict.

A game of high stakes indeed.

Self indulgent stat pron...

Quite astonishingly, on 14th May 2009, the Throne welcomed a reader from the Lebanon, making that benighted land the one hundredth country to host a visitor.

Just as astonishing (to me, anyway) is the fact that only slightly over 55% of my visitors are from the 'U'K, with visitors from the US accounting for over 22% of readers.

As traditionalists say in this part of England, "Who'd o' thowt it!"

(Rough translation for the uninitiated: "Who would have thought it?" or "They are a somewhat unexpected set of statistics.")

The true face of Ireland's theocracy...

The more I see and read about stories such as this and this, the more I go down on bended knee and thank God that I was not brought up in an Irish orphanage run by tyrannical and all-too-frequently sexually depraved Catholic priests.

Or, had I been born both female and Irish, that I was not judged to be a ‘fallen woman’ on what appears in many cases to have been the flimsiest of pretexts and as a consequence of that judgement, to have been incarcerated by vicious nuns for the remainder of my life and used as slave labour in one of the Catholic church’s Magdalen laundries.

Please do not misinterpret my first two paragraphs as an attack on Ireland as a whole, the Irish, or on the wider Catholic Church, because they aren’t meant to be any of those things.

What they are intended to be is an attack on the unaccountable Catholic theocracy which, it seems to me, had the whip hand in the governance of the twenty-six counties from the time of the partition, until as recently as twenty years or so ago.

And unless any of my Irish (or indeed any other) readers can tell me differently, this was a uniquely Irish phenomenon, because I am not aware that the Church was similarly powerful, or of any similar allegations being made about Church-run institutions in other predominantly Catholic countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Poland or Italy, or for that matter, the entirety of Latin America or the Philippines.

Of course an unacceptable proportion of children brought up in institution settings in this country and probably every other country in the world were subjected to abuse, both physical and sexual, by their so-called 'carers'.

But those carers were not priests, nuns or monks and none of them were able, with the tacit support of their senior hierarchy, to imprison and enslave women for the rest of their lives on the mere suspicion of moral turpitude.

None of them set themselves up as moral exemplars and demanded such grovelling deference from lay people that it all but smothered any opposition, labelling their few (and morally courageous) detractors as lunatics or heretics.

I am glad to see that the final traces of those theocratic shackles are now being removed from the people of Ireland and the publication of the report into that sixty-year catalogue of abuse and cover-ups prepared by the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, is another important step along that long and often painful path.

The final step, though, has to be the prosecution of those responsible for carrying out the abuse. Only then will the outrageous injustices, compounded by their being committed by the so-called Godly, finally be put to bed and seeing the reaction of some of their victims on the news today, I rather get the impression that they will not rest until their assailants and jailers are brought to justice.

And more power to their collective elbow, I say.

I wish to register a complaint...

A friend of mine emailed me the following gems yesterday evening and I thought they were worth sharing with a wider audience...

This was sent from Thomas Cook Holidays - listing some of the guests' complaints during the season.

(Survey by Thos Cook and ABTA)

"I think it should be explained in the brochure that the local store does not sell proper biscuits like custard creams or ginger nuts."

"It's lazy of the local shopkeepers to close in the afternoons. I often needed to buy things during 'siesta' time - this should be banned."

"On my holiday to Goa in India , I was disgusted to find that almost every restaurant served curry. I don't like spicy food at all."

"We booked an excursion to a water park but no-one told us we had to bring our swimming costumes and towels."

A tourist at a top African game lodge overlooking a waterhole, who spotted a visibly aroused elephant, complained that the sight of this rampant beast ruined his honeymoon by making him feel "inadequate".

A woman threatened to call police after claiming that she'd been locked in by staff. When in fact, she had mistaken the "do not disturb" sign on the back of the door as a warning to remain in the room.

"The beach was too sandy."

"We found the sand was not like the sand in the brochure. Your brochure shows the sand as yellow but it was white."

A guest at a Novotel in Australia complained his soup was too thick and strong. He was inadvertently slurping the gravy at the time.

"Topless sunbathing on the beach should be banned. The holiday w as ruined as my husband spent all day looking at other women."

"We bought 'Ray-Ban' sunglasses for five Euros (£3.50) from a street trader, only to find out they were fake."

"No-one told us there would be fish in the sea. The children were startled."

"It took us nine hours to fly home from Jamaica to England it only took the Americans three hours to get home."

"I compared the size of our one-bedroom apartment to our friends' three-bedroom apartment and ours was significantly smaller."

"The brochure stated: 'No hairdressers at the accommodation'. We're trainee hairdressers - will we be OK staying here?"

"There are too many Spanish people. The receptionist speaks Spanish. The food is Spanish. Too many foreigners."

"We had to queue outside with no air conditioning."

"It is your duty as a tour operator to advise us of noisy or unruly guests before we travel."

"I was bitten by a mosquito - no-one said they could bite."

"My fiancé and I booked a twin-bedded room but we were placed in a double-bedded room. We now hold you responsible for the fact that I find myself pregnant. This would not have happened if you had put us in the room that we booked."

Heaven help us!

Awe-inspiring England...

Regular visitors to the Throne will have noticed that I have recently begun posting pictures of the Cross of St George being flown that I stumble across on my travels around Lancashire.

The one depicted to the left was flying from the flag pole on top of the illuminated inner keep at Clitheroe Castle late last night. Whilst the photograph in question, taken on my mobile phone, doesn't really do the view justice - please believe me when I say it was a truly marvellous, indeed awe-inspiring, sight.

I suspect that I will struggle to find a better, or more fitting background for our flag, no matter how hard, or for how long I try...

Meanwhile the one flying from the top of RibbleValley Council offices that I posted about a couple of weeks ago has been removed. Let's hope it only a temporary absence.

On, on, you noblest English!

May I take this opportunity to wish all of my fellow Englishmen and women, and all my other visitors a very happy St George's Day.

I shall be shortly bobbing out for a good old-fashioned 'rinse' to celebrate the day in style.

Cheers everyone!

Irish health and English taxes...

Regular visitors to the Throne – how many posts have I begun with those, or similar words recently – will know that I maintain a keen interest in Irish politics and Irish affairs generally.

As a consequence this story from The Times, which was also widely reported elsewhere, came as something of a surprise, because I had never seen neither hide nor hair of it before in either the English or Irish press and I dare say very few other people at this side of the Irish Sea, except those working at the Department of Health, knew of it either.

What struck me about the subject matter discussed in the article was not the fact that our civil servants had somehow managed to pay too much to the Irish as our contribution to the healthcare of an estimated 50,000 Irish citizens who had previously lived and worked in this country and paid National Insurance contributions, but that we gave them anything at all.

And before I go on, please do not take my preceding paragraph as some sort of slight on Ireland or the Irish; it is most certainly not meant as anything of the kind.

What I do criticise is the fact that for forty years, British governments of both colours have seen fit to send large sums of money across the Irish Sea, which should never have been sent.

Quite simply, those fifty-thousand Irish citizens who came to this country, presumably in search of employment which they couldn’t obtain in Ireland, paid their taxes here in order to share in the benefits of the services those levies provided for the rest of us.

Similarly, their National Insurance contributions, paid to the British Exchequer, entitled them to medical treatment free at the point of delivery in British hospitals and doctors’ surgeries as and when they required it whilst they lived here; just as would be the case for people of any other nationality living and working here and paying their taxes like the rest of us.

However, in my view, as soon as those Irish citizens returned to Ireland and ceased paying our taxes and National Insurance contributions, they no longer had, or continue to have, any ongoing call on the services provided by this country for the benefit of its residents and citizens. In essence, those concerned paid for a form of insurance policy which was valid whilst they were living here; it was not and should never have been considered to be a savings scheme with their contributions repayable to the Irish Government on their return to the State. On any sensible view, once they returned home and stopped paying, the policy and the contract it represented should have been regarded as lapsed, leaving no further obligation on either party, and the Irish Health Service should have taken the strain.

Again, I don’t blame the Irish for this frankly unacceptable waste of (largely English) taxpayers’ money; they would have been stupid to reject what, as recently as 2007, was effectively a gift of 9,000 Euros or about £8,500 per annum from HMG for each and every one of those 50,000 people.

No, as I made plain earlier in this post, this gratuitous and frankly unacceptable waste of public money is the responsibility the successive British Governments who allowed it to persist unchecked for so long.

The time has come to cancel that particular national standing order forthwith, as it is not our responsibility legally, morally or medically to go on paying it.

The world's shortest fairy tale...

Exactly what it says on the tin...

Once upon a time, a guy asked a girl, 'Will you marry me?'

The girl said, 'NO!'

And the guy lived happily ever after and rode motorcycles and went fishing and hunting and played golf a lot and drank beer and scotch and left the toilet seat up and broke wind whenever he wanted.

The End

Unexpected England...

The eagle-eyed amongst you may have already seen that the rather unprepossessing building pictured to the left of this post is the headquarters of Ribble Valley Borough Council, in Clitheroe.

Unprepossessing it might be, but just take a look at the flag billowing uncontrollably from the top of the flag pole in the late March gales.

No, your eyes do not deceive you, it is the Cross of St George. And for those of you thinking that its presence is a one-off affectation, never to be repeated again, let me reassure you that the English flag flies from that pole on a regular, if not daily, basis.

How refreshing to see a borough council (mine, as it happens) prepared to fly our nation's flag; and what a stark and welcome contrast to the attitude of the many that dishonestly refuse to do so on the basis that it is a 'racist' symbol.

It almost makes me happy to pay my council tax... Almost.

God save the King or Queen...

Given my previous posts on the subject of the monarchy, I suspect my regular reader would be surprised if I wasn't to offer my two penn'orth on this story, which has been widely reported in today's papers, on television and, of course, across the internet.

To come to the point quickly, I wholeheartedly agree with the proposal that our future monarchs should be the eldest child of his or her predecessor, irrespective of their gender; and I would regard any suggestion that the status quo, (where the eldest son inherits, regardless of his possibly having an elder sister or sisters), should be maintained as being offensive to women in general and not least to our present Queen, who has performed the role in an exemplary fashion for the last fifty-seven years.

Indeed, her present majesty aside, haven't some of our best, or at least best known monarchs been women?

Who can argue that Elizabeth I was not at least as good a monarch as her father Henry VIII, or that he is better known to both posterity and history than she is? And yes, there have been bad queens - Elizabeth's elder sister Mary (known to history as 'Bloody' Mary, as a result of her enthusiasm for burning protestants to death) for one - but then again, Kings John, Charles I, his son James II (and VII) and George IV, were hardly star turns, either.

So far, then, so good.

I would not, however, make any such change in the line of succession retrospective, because there is no need to do so. Barring an unforseen disaster, we know that our next and next-but-one monarchs will be men, in the form of Prince Charles and Prince William respectively, so why bother shifting Princess Anne up the pecking order, when - barring that cataclysm - she is as unlikely to ascend the Throne as either of her younger brothers, or their children?

Moving on, some have argued that there is little point in making this change now, because we have bigger fish to fry in the shape of the gathering financial storm and further, that the reason this story has emerged now is simply that The Idiot is keen to keep coverage of the economic situation off the front pages. I have a degree of sympathy with both those propositions, but I would like to see the 'rule' changed as soon as it can reasonably be done, irrespective of the fact that the male line is secured for the next two generations.

Why?

Simply this. It is entirely possible, indeed probable, that Prince William will marry and have children within the next five years. I would like to see the change brought in before those children are born, because by doing so, everyone will know that irrespetive of their gender, his eldest child will become the heir apparent to the crown; a position which would avoid our going through the confusing and unsatisfactory procedure the Swedes did in 1980, when the then one-year-old Crown Prince Carl Philip was dislodged from the succession by his elder sister, the then three-year-old Princess Victoria, by a change in Swedish law.

Much better, in my view, to have the situation resolved before any of William's children are born, then everybody - including the Royal Family - knows exactly where the eldest child stands, irrespective of the gender of any subsequent children.

Turning to the position that the Monarchy finds itself in vis-a-vis the Roman Cathlic Church, the situation is a little trickier.

I agree that it seems unsustainable that anyone in the line of succession to the Throne who chose to marry a Catholic would lose his or her right to accede, when such a prohibtion does not apply to followers of any other religion, whether it be Islam, Hinduism, Judaism or Jedi Knight.

The problem, if indeed it is one in these increasingly secular times, is that the Monarch is also ex officio the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and as such, it is inconceivable that an individual who was a practising member of another relgion (or version of it in this case) could lead a second one of which he or she was not a practising member.

The upshot would be the disestablishment of the Church of England, a possibility recently described by that weird druid currently masquerading as the Archbishop of Canterbury, as 'not being the end of the world'. Then again, with his churches as empty as a hermit's address book and half his clergy unable to decide whether they are Arthur or Martha, I don't suppose disestablishment would be more than a hiccup on the CoE's catastrophic journey into irrelevant oblivion.

Then again, if Prince William were to marry his long-term girlfriend, Kate Middleton, herself a member of the Church of England, any urgency in having to address what would then be a theoretical problem in respect of the person of the monarch himself would be removed for at least the next fifty years.

Problem solved, then...

Steven Gerrard: innocent until proven guilty: update...

Just under three months ago, I posted this item, in which I wrote of my disdain for those who suggested that Steven Gerrard should not be selected to play for his country, or his club, because he had been arrested and charged with both assault occasioning actual bodily harm and affray following an incident in a Southport nightclub.

As I wrote then, there is a golden thread in English law called the presumption of innocence. For the benefit of the uninitiated, that means that any person (including famous ones) accused of a crime in this country, however serious, is presumed to be innocent of that crime until he or she is proved to be guilty of it by due process of law.

Three months on and we learn that the assault charge has been formally discontinued against Gerrard and his six co-accused due to there being insufficient evidence to justify the matter being taken to trial.

And whilst I appreciate that he still faces the affray charge, I wonder if the people - especially those journalists who really ought to have known better - who were calling for his exclusion from the England team when he was charged now realise how premature and downright unfair they were to do so.

Happy St Patrick's Day...

May I take this opportunity to wish my Irish readers a very happy St Patrick's Day.

Would it be impolite of me to ask, An bhfuil tú dálta fós?

Buy Lancashire Tea...

The Throne doesn't normally 'do' advertising; not because of any ethical difficulties in doing so you understand, it's simply that I didn't start the blog with that in mind.

However, I am making an exception today for one product: Lancashire Tea.

If you find yourself in a Sainsbury's store within the borders of the County Palatine in the near future, short of what we in this county call "brewing tackle", please go and buy some Lancashire Tea.

Why? I hear you cry; what's wrong with my usual fare, why should I buy Lancashire Tea instead?

For two very good reasons: firstly, it makes a rattling good cup of tea and secondly, and far more importantly, the owners of the company which makes it will contribute five pence from every purchase of the product to the SSAFA Forces Help (Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Family Association); an organisation committed to helping servicemen and women and their families, including their widows, widowers and dependents when they are in need.

So there you are. Next time you're doing the shopping, please buy some Lancashire Tea; you will be doing both your tastebuds and your country a favour.

It's been a while...again.

Once again, a particularly busy period at work has robbed me of the time and opportunity to post as frequently as I would have liked over the last week or so.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about having a demanding job, particularly so in the current financial climate, but working several twelve or forteen hour days on the bounce doesn't half eat into the time available for posting.

However, the latest project was successfully delivered to the customer on Friday evening, which should mean that I have more time to burden you with my ramblings over the next month or so.

Meanwhile, thanks for continuing to visit; you are always welcome.

Can we borrow Judge John Neilan, please?

What a pity Judge John Neilan sits in Irish courts, rather than English ones...

Do you think he'd consider a transfer?

Happy New Year...

May I take the opportunity with this, my 191st - and last - post of 2008, to wish all of my readers (shouldn't take long!) and other occasional, or even accidental visitors to the Throne, a very Happy and prosperous New Year for 2009.

Thank you all for visiting and even more so to those of you who have been kind enough to leave me your comments - even the critical ones.

I hope to see you all again in 2009, or when I've sobered up, whichever is the sooner...