Post 307. FATHER'S DAY 2018.

LOST ANOTHER DAY OF SCRIBBLING.

It just vanished.

A short while ago the computer lifeboat captain made a fine job of fixing my draft blog post page and it worked a treat for post 306. Dunno what I did to annoy it last Saturday, but on the Sunday, Father's Day, I switched on and found myself faced with a blank page. Every bloggin' thing I had written was gone. What? Oh, I think I saved it – just don't know where it went.
That's me and technology.

Ah well.
Back to page one, which I think started with: WHATEVER HAPPENED

TO SPEAKING YOUR MIND?

The PC Brigade GB has effortlessly become the Corps of Political Correctness and, with the addition of the Fairness to Foreigners Division, is fast transforming into PC National Command.

Whatever happened to speaking your mind?

Time was when expressions like tell the truth and shame the devil were commonplace and the privilege of publicly expressing one's opinion was accepted without question.

Not now.

Now I am reminded again and again that when, back in 2015 - Post 2(32) - I wrote Honesty is not always the best policy. (Ask Gerald Ratner. Ask Brian True-May) I was merely putting forward a token objection to the way in which an individual's entire life could be realigned (even ruined) by the negative input of unwell-wishers. Little did I foresee the army of professional objectors who would gradually take over the UK with all the ruthlessness of ducking parties on archaic witch hunts.

During the past week the author Lionel Shriver has been dropped as a literary judge after she criticised the latest diversity and inclusion policies proposed by Penguin Random House. It seems Ms. Shriver, writing in The Spectator, dared to suggest that Penguin was “drunk on virtue.” 
The editorial director of the magazine Mslexia duly removed her from the judging panel of their annual short story competition for, it would seem, the sin of speaking her mind.

I shan't elaborate. It's all on Google. If you're interested, look it up.

I do despair though.

Know nothing of Lionel Shriver and hold no brief for the magazine that carried her views, but whatever has happened to freedom of speech? And how long before we hang the people who exercise it?

This has become an age of mad intolerance.
TELEVISION.

The Wright Stuff (Chanel 5) But not anymore.

Last Thursday Matthew Wright made his final appearance as presenter of this morning chat show. 

He had been in the chair for the better part of eighteen years and said he wanted to spend more time with his wife. Good for him. I hope she was with him on the evening of the same day when he was welcomed at Cardiff for David Dimbleby's Question Time on BBC 1 despite having bitched about the Beeb throughout his entire tenure on The Wright Stuff.

Clearly not everybody is opposed to freedom of speech, though in this case I think it more likely that nobody from Broadcasting House has even glanced at Chanel 5 for the past eighteen years.

Good luck, Matthew.

That's all, folks.