I happened to be passing a real newspaper stand the other day and noticed that the front page carried a story about Boris Johnson (current Mayor of London, MP, future Torymeister?) and what he thought about the UK leaving the EU. According to Boris, Cameron went to Brussels to get a deal and got “two-thirds of diddly squat.” So I thought about it some more, especially the phrase “diddly squat”….. and the result is plainly for your ears only, dear listener.

I was watching the telly the other evening when I saw a comedian do a little routine about German people and he just couldn’t resist dragging out a few stereotypes. You know what they are, don’t you? Harking back to the war, mainly – the war that ended over 70 years ago. I then realised that I’ve been getting tired of this lazy wartime stereotyping for quite a while.

By the way, the picture shows the England football team giving the Nazi salute at a 1938 friendly versus Germany in Berlin.

According to some sources, loads of foreign nationals are coming to the UK for their health! Good for them – just like in the picture, they can convalesce by swimming in our tropical seas and lazing on the beaches of the English Riviera.

I think some of them might even be living here.

Last year sometime I received an email from a campaigning group about this guy in Saudi Arabia who had been sentenced to 1000 lashes. His crime? Writing a blog. Nothing particularly revolutionary or subversive – certainly not by our standards – but obviously this was seen as a threat by the Saudi regime. He’s still in jail and he’s had 50 lashes so afar. There’s no diplomatic movement on our side: we buy their oil, they buy our guns.

Amnesty International webpage on Raif.