In reality, Britain lost 449,800 soldiers in World War II - which was over 30,000 than US casualties. Britain also fought alone during World War Two until the United States became involved in December 1941. Now, while no one should discount the tremendous role that the United States played in securing the allied victory (not to mention them being suppliers of nessecary war materials like gas oil to Europe), let us not forget that it was Britain who stood alone during those dark months of 1940 and 1941. Winning the Battle of Britain was one of the country’s greatest achievements. It was a victory against an enemy which was clearly superior both technically and numerically. In addition, the Germans were capable of drawing up an army that was exceptionally vast for a country of its size.

This was because Nazi Germany was not a democracy - it could literally achieve whatever targets Hitler would order, with not an ounce of thought for the hardship that all of the workers in the Nazi war machine would have to suffer. Britain could not do that - and the simple reason being that it was not a fascist dictatorship. It could not subject millions of Britons to torturous manual labour, to severe punishment and train millions of young soldiers to become killing machines.

Britain’s success at shooting down an overwhelming number of Luftwaffe planes meant that Germany’s ’Operation Sealion'plan had failed. This put Hitler in an incredibly difficult situation, especially after the Soviets emerged significantly stronger in the war than he could ever have anticipated, after Hitler invaded Russia in the summer of 1941.

To say that Britain played a ’junior'role is to completely undermine the role of some 449,800 British soldiers who sacrificed their lives to save their country from the most brutal regime in world history.

“You can lose weight with just a few simple changes. “ “Just workout thirty minutes a day and you’ll lose weight.” “Just a bit of Liposuction surgery will do the trick”. We’ve all heard these things before and from time to time have actually attempted to take a stab at it. We don’t go to the extreme of throwing out everything bad for us in the house but we do buy a couple of healthy things to try to eat. While eating healthy foods will help us to lose weight it can be really hard to do. Most of us do not know how to prepare healthy foods. We know how to eat fruits and vegetables raw but do not know how to cook them. We do not have a clue about seasonings, spreads, or dips. We know about dressings and caramels. The average person knows how to grill a burger or make spaghetti. Most do not know how to make a wine sauce or any exquisite meal. There are so many different factors to eating well that it is sometimes just too much to even think about let alone actually doing.

Exercising thirty minutes a day does not sound like a long time. But when you think about everything that is involved with exercising it is tiring. You have to get out whatever equipment you need. Change into workout clothing. Get your water. Get a towel for your sweat. Work out. Shower. Put away your workout equipment. Then you have to do the same thing day after day. It can be very monotonous and hard to motivate yourself to do it. So, when reading all of the articles about how easy it is to lose weight we sometimes remember all the work it is to lose weight and just get out the ice cream and sprinkles and let lifting the spoon be our workout for the day.

Someone who has tried to change, and good luck to him (and yes, it seems he has managed it with some kind of success), writes about his experience in the following blog post.

It still doesn’t make me want to follow suit, though.

According to the post there will be more life challenges in the future. Which disturbs me. What will this energy saving trailblazer think of next? Who knows, but if you want to find out you’d better keep checking back for more.

These Enigin people are, if you didn’t know, right at the cutting-edge of energy saving stuff (by stuff I mean devices, plans to help businesses, and all that jazz). Saving money and not wasting energy is something they do as a matter of routine, you see; it seems to be in their blood. It’s their job, and every day is spent educating the rest of the world about how to follow suit. Which is a pretty good way to go, I think.

I wonder why it is that so many people insist on shouting all of the time. Most of us just speak at an average sort of volume, but there is always the odd one or two who feel it necessary to talk in a really booming great voice. That’s all well and good, but it means that many other people suffer from bad bouts of ear-ache…

Some people shout because they have a genuine hearing problem; and if they don’t realise they are doing it then you can forgive them. Unfortunately, most folk who go around shouting instead of talking do it out of sheer ignorance. They usually tend to be overbearing and ‘in-your-face’ types who get off on the sound of their own voice.

The other problem is that loud people spawn loud kids! If you bring your children up in an environment where everyone is shouting all the time, then guess what? Yup, your kids will grow up shouting all the time as well! It may be to do with psychology, but it isn’t exactly rocket science, is it? And that means even more suffering for the rest of us. So, if your parents are loud, whilst you are essentially a quiet person, then it may be a good idea to get a DNA test; the chances are that you are not actually related after all!!!

Everyone should be heard, but we all need to talk at a sensible volume. I wonder why it is that ‘shouters’ don’t realise just how loud they are compared to everyone else.

You know that saying “Like a sitting duck?” Well–How daft is that? If you’ve ever approached a sitting duck (sleeping, eating, any kind of duck, really) then you’ll know that you have absolutely zero chance of getting within five feet of it without it quacking loudly and waddling away from you at speed.

This was the topic of conversation in the pub last week (along with why horses are dangerous and Liposuction surgery). To cut a long story short, my friend Ted bet me five pounds that I could get within five feet of a sitting duck. I bet five pounds that I couldn’t. Now, before long a small crowd had assembled at our table. Everyone had an opinion, and so in the end a time and date was set to put the bet to rest: we would do it the following day, in the park.

Far as rules went, there was only one: I had to try my hardest to catch a duck, and invigilators would be on hand to make sure I did so.

The day came. We all met a few hundred metres from a gang of ducks who were renowned for their speed and quacking. Then I snuck up towards them, and I charged–

And the unexpected happened! It turned out that I had picked a particularly sleepy duck–and before I could think I had the little fella in my hands!

“What do I do?!” I screamed. Meanwhile the duck pecked at me and tried to flee. I had no intention of keeping hold of it, of course, only the bird had got its webbed foot trapped in my jumper. He’d stuck it through a hole and got trapped!

It all turned out ok in the end. The duck was released, and I lost my five pounds.

“I feel great after working out”. “I feel energized.” “I feel so much better than if I had just sat down and watched TV with a tub of deluxe toffee ice cream, honestly!”

Pants do you! I mean, seriously, are these people for real? Do they honestly expect us non worker-outers to believe this rubbish? I don’t believe it for a second. I believe that exercise can benefit you greatly, but I’m no idiot.

Now, it may sound as though I am being a total pessimist, but I’m not. This, I feel confident, is the voice of the people. And someone needs to stand up against all these exercise-energizer people, don’t they? Otherwise we’ll be in a situation like back in the eighties again, where people wearing lycra rule the world–And we just can’t have that. We have enough problems already.

Just to be sure that I was correct in my thinking that after exercise a person feels awful, I went on an exercise mission. Not just a jog, oh no. So much more. I donned my age old lycra running shorts and took to the streets. After that I took my small yet workable canoe down to the river, and by heck did I go downstream fast (after a brief attempt to go upstream that almost gave me a heart attack).

Here are my conclusions: the jog hurt like hell, after it it just got worse. The canoe trip went badly (even with my travel pillow to make it a little more comfortable), as I am inexperienced and kept hitting people. The general overview? The whole thing sucked. Screw being fit. I say don’t bother.

I don’t know much about common things, like how to have a Gastric band fitted, or how fast the planets go as they rotate and all that. But what I do know is just as important: Badgers get a raw deal. Not because they strongly resemble one of those black and white boiled sweets that you can’t buy anymore—make a comparison, they really actually do—but because of their fiendish, malevolent nature. Apparently. It’s rubbish of course, a complete load of old tripe! If a badger gets fiendish or malevolent (or both, in extreme circumstances) then it’s more likely that you were in the wrong: my advice, don’t poke a badger unless you want to loose blood. And if you have to poke one, at least make sure it’s awake first.

I don’t know where all this started. I’m sure badger-hating has always been there in some form or another. All I know is that people have this idea that the badgers invaded our society, building sets deliberately to spite humans. While that may be the case in a small number of really evil badger cases, the reality is far different. Thanks to a TV show about Badgers the other day, I learnt something vital to the protect-the-Badger-from abuse cause: what I learnt was that Badgers had their sets here long before we settled. In fact, we were the ones who invaded their land, so it’s no wonder Badger’s have their face set in such a way as to always look in a mood–wouldn’t you be if people came and took over your land?

The event I am about to talk about happened last weekend. I boarded a train to a certain place in the south of England that begins with the letter after M and ends in orfolk and made the mistake of thinking that an empty table might remain all to myself–

The guy was obese, wielding a plastic bag that had been used so much it looked like one-thousand year-old silk, and staring at me as if to make conversation. I said “Hello”. He said, “Thot yood av this all to yerself di ya?’ I said, “Hmm,” and under my breath “what is that smell?”

It was sushi of course. Supermarket sushi: individually wrapped, compact, the ideal meal for the train—providing you aren’t sitting opposite someone (in this case Me) who is wearing the same face as if a horse had just stepped on to the train and done his business on a nearby seat.

Take it from me, never sit at an empty table seat…

1. Procrastination. Why do something now when I can leave it to later? This has always been my problem since I was a kid. I would sit down to study for an important exam, but in the background the TV is on, and what do you know! The A-Team is on! The importance of my exam is a sliver in comparison to the monumental importance of watching BA Baracus get tricked into getting on to an airplane

2. Gossip. I want to clarify, that I am not a gossip starter; I just seem to be the person that people unload all of their gossip onto. This is not a problem in itself; however, I never discourage people from doing it. I need to turn around and not listen to them, or just simply change the subject.

3. Call my mother. I rarely call my mother. It doesn’t help that she lives on the other side of the planet, but still. A simple webcam once a week is easy enough to do, and I always feel better about myself when I do.

4. Stop thinking I’m better than everyone else. If someone doesn’t share my tastes in music, movies, books, or even jokes, or if they spend their money on silly things like Botox Cheshire, I think they are idiots. Now, I’m not a particularly arrogant person; in fact I have a very low self image, but when people don’t like what I like, I feel there is something fundamentally wrong with them.

5. Enjoy my Sundays. When the weekend comes, there is no better joy. A free two days to do what I want. But after the hedonistic Saturday, Sunday pops up and all I can think about is the fact that I have to work in the morning. My whole day is ruined; in effect, my weekends are only Saturdays. I need to start looking at Sundays as a great day, and ignore the fact that I have to work in the morning.

Kurt Vonnegut died a while ago, and it still makes me sad. In my mind, you should not even be able to apply for Secondary education job openings unless you have a good knowledge of his literature. If you don’t know his literature, there’s a good chance that his style of writing is the style for you: Vonnegut wrote with a sharp, caustic wit, his rants always derailing the argument he was trying to put across by going off at a tangent which revealed an honesty seldom seen in modern authors. The man, quite simply, knew what he wanted to say and was not afraid of contradicting himself. Rather than trying to bury these contradictions—usually cultural—he embraced them, exposing the riddles of his mind and asking others to do the same.

Another unique facet of his writing was his way of perceiving the source of it, and what led him to record his deepest darkest thoughts: the German American saw no reason for English academies to rule the literary world. He himself was, in fact, a scientist and an academic of the sort that most English academies refused to accept as reasonably literate, or worthwhile as authors. He didn’t care about their opinion, of course. This became something he pushed at every opportunity, questioning why a person had to be a certain way to do a certain thing.

The book is a fine piece of work by anyone’s standards. Child-like and heartbreakingly taught in places—with Vonnegut recalling the horrors of war and other such atrocities he has not allowed to stay hidden—the book is a short one, but full of love, promise and value. It is the work of a man who has accepted everything thrown at him, and has altered his perspective to dissect each thing, seeing not only the big things that matter to the world as a whole but those smaller things. Those tings which identify us as free-thinking individuals, born to question rather than merely just accept.