I’M WAR STRUCK

There he stood, head bowed low so as to keep it hid from the German gunners a hundred metres away. This British soldier has now spent eight months in these bloody trenches with a battle front that was neither going forward nor backward. It was wet underfoot and everything was damp. The smell of mouldy sox, pee-soaked underwear and rotting leather combined to make it almost unbreathable in his isolated little foxhole. He had been alone now for three days waiting for someone, to relieve him. His rations were almost out and he began to wonder whether anyone besidse himself was still alive out there.

He fell silent and clung closer to the wall of his hole. Had he heard something? The enemy? Was he about to die?

Everyone around him was either just laying silent or were dead. The only thing he could see behind him was several parts of someone’s body scattered from the direct hit from a mortar. It had been his predecessor. He had died while defending this part of the line and the soldier thought that maybe that was his future as well. Every man who had occupied this trench had been killed and their heads struck various gazes from around the parapet.

That sound. A rustling, creeping, crawling sound came from behind him and he felt a little relieved. From over his head a voice called.

‘Oi! Mate. Anyone f*cken there?’

The soldier harshly whispered for he had not spoken in days. ‘Friend or foe?‘

‘Friend, a f*ckin friend - ya f*cken dork’’ came the reply.

‘What’s the password? ‘He queried.

‘Your mother’s a slut’, said the voice, uttering the secret words for that week. He didn’t always appreciate the sense of humour of his Australian Commander when setting passwords.

‘Advance friend and be recognised’ said the relieved soldier in the trench ‘am I glad to hear a live voice for once’.

With that a khaki clad body, uniform fresh as a daisy fell into the pit. ‘Shit!’ it exclaimed ‘f*cken mud all over me f*cken gear’.

‘Welcome to my humble trench’ said the British soldier ‘I take it that you are an Australian’.

‘You’re f*ckin right you f*cken Pom’ said the Aussie.

To the relief of the Brit at having been relieved by anyone, even an Aussie he asked the inevitable question.

‘Have you come here to die?’ he asked.

‘No’ came the reply ‘ I got here f*cken yesterdie’.

Boom Boom

EVEN THE BAD GUYS CAN BE HEROES.

Two things that annoy me are people that whinge about the government but just donkey vote or don't vote at all and those who are quite happy to suck the nipples of the state, like unemployment benefits and universal health care, without recognising who provided those benefits in the first place.

I openly admit that Gough Whitlam had a vision for Australia that his Ministers didn't quite share, and I'll even give credit to Malcolm Fraser, even though he did send me off to Asia for a working holiday in Vietnam, for the good work he did following the Menzies era. I admired Gough, Fraser and his ilk, John Gorton, although he was too far left for his right to be comfortable and the Elders Curtin, Chifley and Menzies.

All of these men, whether to the left or the right did some good for the country unlike the syncophants that walk the halls of power these days. Even Malcolm Fraser decried the fact that Statesmen were no longer around but only party hacks and functionaries that managed to leap-frog and back-stab there way to the top. In this group I place Gillard, Rudd and Abbott firmly at the centre ??? well, the jury is still out but I do hear the grinding of knife sharpeners somewhere behind Turnbull..

No amount of shuffling of the portfolios makes one bit of difference except maybe taking out a whinging Poodle and replacing them with a Rottweiller. Back to the whingers. Don't stand near me and cry foul about Whitlam then put your hand out for unemployment benefits, don't carry on about Labor and then happily traipse down to the doctor for free health services, don't cry in your beer when you have to pay some of the cost of your medicines. Nearly all the benefits of a welfare state came through the Labor ranks.

Maybe there are exceptions but it seems to me that the Liberal-National party sends us off to war and Labor brings us back. Do I hear howls of derision? Liberals brought in Conscription and Labor saw it farewelled. Gough brought in Free Education so the potential of every child could be reached only to be terminated by Howard two decades later, after all his supporters had graduated for free of course.

There is good and bad in every political party despite your voting preferences, even the Sex Party has some great policies, so rather than just scream blue murder about the party you don't like think about the party you do or even consider the ideas of single issue groups off in fairyland. We live in a democracy and to make that democracy work we are allowed to vote them in or out every four years. Lets see what the winners do and then vote accordingly the next time.

To change the words of Gough and as a warning to all knee-jerk voters

“May well we say God Save Trump for there is nothing that can save America”

FREEWAY, TOLLWAY AND EXPRESSWAY

What does these words mean? My Larousse Dictionary describes Freeway as a noun meaning ‘a toll free expressway’ and a Tollway as a noun meaning ‘‘a fee may be charged to use the expressway’. What I still don’’t understand is that in reality both are one in the same, the only difference is that on a Tollway to have to pay to get f…… about. When I look up the term Expressway it becomes very clear being described as a wide divided road which has several lanes and limited access, and which crosses other roads at a different level, for ‘high speed’ through traffic. Someone should write to the compilers of dictionaries to point out the gross error in their definitions. And to correct them immediately.

On a trip to Melbourne recently using both types of expressway I found no difference between government built monstrosities from which serving politicians derive their income and the private road from which retired politicians derive their income and both road systems are controlled by the ’Mysterious Reasons Agency’.

The MRA is like Homeland Security. A non-cooperative group of different government departments and private agencies tasked with thwarting terrorism by making it impossible to deliver any form of device, be it car, truck, trailer or second-hand bomb from one side of the city to the other. Of course this means that sometimes there is collateral damage manifested in unintended circumstances which also prevent everyone else from crossing from one side of the city to the other.

The various agencies involved use ten differing methods to achieve their aims.

The steeple-chasers, those employees whose job it is to erect as many barriers as possible for other workers to stand behind and then retire to a shed for the day to watch SBS soccer.

Members of the Lollypop League whose job it seems is to jump out in front of cars vigorously waving red and yellow ‘slow’ signs and then violently spin it to ‘stop’’ the moment you are two metres away from them. If you are quick enough the lollypop will not get tangled up in your windscreen wipers, if not you will be faced with a rather ugly mug flattened against your windscreen glass.

The Driver with the epileptic foot that alternates between 5 and 60 km/hr because the speed sign said 40. Sitting behind one of these drivers is like being assaulted by red strobe lights that inevitably mean that anyone who suffers from real epilepsy is also about to start disco dancing in their car.

The ‘Gamers’ who, with a Controller in their hand, create havoc changing the electronic speed signs. Over a ten kilometres stretch they can make twenty changes to the speed signs for no apparent reason except to play with your mind.

The overhead electronic gantries designed to flash messages from the Traffic Mess Centre somewhere in downtown St.Kilda. By watching streaming videos from various observation points they can direct the signs to make all manner of statements that may or may not actually be true. ‘Slow down traffic hazard ahead’ and ‘prepare yee the way to change lanes at any moment’ are two of the more popular messages, but the most annoying is the ‘‘prepare to stop ahead’ when you have been sitting motionless for 15 minutes.

The motorway gantries to indicate your speed that either do not work or inexplicably measure the car speed in the lane beside you.

This combination of events will then so confuse you that you have no idea what speed you are supposed to be driving at just in time to have your photo taken and speed recorded at the ‘safety camera’ installed on yet another overhead gantry. I’’m not sure of the correct figures but probably $15 million may have been collected last year just from these camera alone, but then we see that it cost $16 million to install and monitor them over the same period. This loss is then made up by collections from Parking Metres and that is less than what Gina Reinhardt pays in tax. I told you it was all mysterious didn’t I? There is no evidence being presented that prove that speed cameras have saved a single life and plenty of evidence to say they haven’t.

What about the fictional signs ? Dan Brown could write another Da Vinci Code trying to explain why speed warning signs force you to slow down to 40 only to find the only thing happening was you slowing down to 40, or the ‘Work on Side Road’ when you can’t even find a side road.

I would just love to be given some super power to be able to deal with the moron who blocks off three of the four lanes available, at a point where you have no escape route, so that one bloke can dig a hole in the verge or mow the median strip with a hand mower.

There seems to be a belief in the MRA that slow speeds save lives when in fact they don’t. Lives are lost through frustration over the drivers employed to slow you down by deliberately travelling 20Km under the speed limit.

A good cure for all of these problems, and a sure-fire way to make expressways do what they are supposed to be doing would be to employ demobbed SAS, fresh back from Afghanistan, to perch themselves on the overhead gantries with the aim of taking out any terrorist not obeying the rules of the road. I would start by positioning a couple of snipers just before the Westgate Bridge to prevent anyone from blocking any lane for any reason that would impede the flow of traffic whether they be a driver, steeple-chaser, lollypop person or the bloke that takes the film out of the speed (sorry ‘safety’) cameras. A quick simple solution to most of the problems preventing expressways from expressing.