Happy...

...400th post

Is this going to be something special? Nah, is it heck. It is going to be a short list of only a few items, detailing why I'm happy at this particular moment.

1. Dear Herge is back with something brilliant. I was so very pleased to see that he'd posted yesterday evening and it looks like a break from blogging has done nothing to stem the flow of his creative juices. Anyway, for those that haven't experienced Angry Chimp, what the hell are you doing reading this crap? Get over there, find the archives and start right at the beginning, way back from February. You won't regret it, I promise you.
2. I am happy because I'm having a codeine moment.
3. My finances seem to be getting settled at long last. Down to only £1000 on credit cards (only!) and my car loan.
4. Max is on the bed next to me, he's gorgeous.
5. The clocks go back tomorrow night and we all get an extra hour in bed on Sunday morning.
6. I have managed to keep to my promise to get back to the gym - at last - I've been twice this week. Plus I'm going for my first bike ride on Sunday - really looking forward to this.
7. I'm going to see the League of Gentlemen stage show on Tuesday.

Such a lame post.

OK then, 6 things that I'm happy about, but there are hundreds of things that I hate about my life - really major, arse-ache things, but I can't do much about them.

You know when you've had a cut and it heals and the scab gets itchy, but it's still sore? I've got one on the back of my hand and it's getting right on my tits.

And you know when you're doing a bit of exercise and you can feel something giving and you should stop, but you don't? Well I felt my knee tweak at the gym earlier and now it's fucking killing me.

Grief junkies

I recall posting something about this sometime shortly after the 7th of July terrorist attacks in London, but there's something going wrong whereby a large proportion of people can be classed as "grief junkies". These are folk who jump on any bandwagon after a natural disaster, death or murder of a child, terrorist attack - for some reason, they need to demonstrate their grief for people they've never even heard of, let alone met. I'm at the other end of the scale and, rightly or wrongly, tend not to care.

Because of the tragic events involving fans of Liverpool Football Club, the people of the city are used to trauma and grief. And, not wanting to say anything out of turn against the victims and families of the Hillsborough disaster, there were a LOT of people who, with the loosest of connections, really jumped on the grief bandwagon and have stayed firmly on it ever since. This type of person revelled in the retained organs scandals at Alder Hey Children's Hospitals and they loved every second of the kidnapping and murder of Ken Bigley (who I don't think had lived in Liverpool for decades).

Rightly or wrongly, because of the grief junkies who have hijacked certain events, people from Liverpool have managed to get themselves a bit of a bad reputation for wallowing in the sorrow of others. And this is a very roundabout way of getting the main point of this rambling pile of crap:

Tributes left for a dead chicken
Flowers and tributes were left in an alleyway where the body of a mystery dead baby was found - before police realised it was only a chicken foetus.

A member of the public discovered the remains in a back alley in the Anfield area of Liverpool. Police cordoned off the scene but soon realised that it was not a human but a chicken foetus. Well-wishers had laid more than a dozen bunches of flowers at the scene, along with cards and teddy bears.

Local gossip
One of the cards read: "RIP Little Baby. Safe in the arms of Jesus. From someone who is a loving mother xxxx."

Merseyside Police told the community on Monday to "stop grieving, it's only a chicken". A spokeswoman for Merseyside Police said: "It seems a member of the public saw the remains of a foetus, which possibly resembled a human foetus, and called us.

"We cordoned off the area to investigate, as we would with any possible suspicious death, but it became apparent it was not a human foetus.

"The flowers and cards are obviously the result of local gossip, but we can assure people that the remains were not human."

Conservative MP and editor of The Spectator Boris Johnson was criticised last year after commenting in the magazine that Liverpudlians were "hooked on grief".