PROPER SOPPY SUNDAY

1.

2.

3. Sween Castle, Scotland

4.

5.

6. China

7.

8.

9.

10. Loch Maree, Scotland.

11.

12.

13. Iceland

14.

15. Or probably not.

16.

17, 18, 19.

THIS IS CHRISTIAN BRITAIN...

Read on Twitter.... If this is true then it's another example of Great British values.

I hope you and your massive family enjoyed Christmas lunch at one of your many state provided homes, your majesty.

No yellow cards for you. If you're fed up with Windsor you can go to Buckingham Palace or Clarence House, Kensington Palace, or St James's. Or you could travel to the colonies and stay at Holyrood.

The hypocrisy is beyond belief.

SOPPY SUNDAY CHRISTMAS SPECIAL

Happy Christmas, and thanks for your support ... Munguin xx

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. Norway.

7.

8. Þingvellir National Park, Iceland

9.

10. Scotland

11.

12.

13. Scotland (Skye).

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. Svartifoss, Iceland

21. Norway

22 .Turkey.

23. Iceland.

24. Skye

JUST FOR A LAUGH

Terrible these days the way people sit there on their phones or iPads, never speaking to each other...

Sounds like him.

A man placed some flowers on the grave of his dearly departed mother and started back toward his car when his attention was diverted to another man kneeling at a grave. 

The man seemed to be praying with profound intensity and kept repeating, "Why did you have to die? Why did you have to die?" 

The first man approached him and said, "Sir, I don't wish to intrude on your private grief, but this demonstration of pain is more than I've ever seen before. For whom do you mourn so deeply? A child? A parent?" 

The mourner took a moment to collect himself, then replied, "My wife's first husband."

A male driver is pulled over by a cop and the following conversation takes place:

Man: What's the problem officer?

Cop: You were going at least 75 in a 55 zone.

Man: No sir, I was going 65.

Wife: Oh Harry. You were going 80.

(Man gives his wife a dirty look.)

Cop: I'm also going to give you a ticket for your broken tail light.

Man: Broken tail light? I didn't know about a broken tail light!

Wife: Oh Harry, you've known about that tail light for weeks.

(Man gives his wife a dirty look.)

Cop: I'm also going to give you a citation for not wearing your seat belt.

Man: Oh, I just took it off when you were walking up to the car.

Wife: Oh Harry, you never wear your seat belt.

Man: Shut your mouth, woman!

Cop: Ma'am, does your husband always talk to you this way?

Wife: No, only when he's drunk.

Jeez, if I had his hair I wouldn't fall out with a wind farm.

HO HO HO

HE MAKES YOU LAUGH...

In his Christmas message to the world, Cameron, the UK's unbeloved prime minister, reminds us that the United Kingdom is a Christian country.

Probably, like every year, his boss will do the same tomorrow.

That's good of them, because it would be easy to forget it.

I've never understood how a country can have a religion. I thought religion was belief and it has never been clear to me how a country can believe in a particular philosophy. A government may have a philosophy which might be, in some way, related to a particular religion, but, when that government is elected by 37% of those who voted, it's not really a yardstick for how the country feels about faith.

So what Cameron presumable means is that the government is Christian. 

News to me.

So what exactly is Christian about it? As a schoolboy I was forced, at school, into Religious Education, which was basically Bible Study, and despite my lack of real interest in it, over the years quite a bit sank in. Frankly I find it difficult to reconcile my memories of the Bible with any of the government's policies. 

And it's not just me. It would be hard to recall the number of time recently that we have seen headlines about bishops of the Church of England criticising the policies of austerity followed by the UK government. 

Christianity Personified

Iain Duncan Smith even mocked them for it. Mr Duncan Smith feels free to do that, but his own sect of Christianity seems to be more in line with the C of E than it does with him.

Recently the Baptists, United Reformers, Church of Scotland and Methodists wrote to Smith asking him to look again at the social security system.

There are more examples here.

Still, what would bishops and popes know about religion compared to the likes of IDS and Cameron, huh?

Image that at your Christmas party

Tomorrow the head of state will undoubtedly tell us, yet again, that her whole life has been dictated by the teachings of Christ, which is probably why she gave her grandson an £8 a year helicopter so he could get home to see his son to bed, at the same time as allowing HER government to get the health service into such a state that, the bulk of hospitals in England are seriously understaffed by nurses, sick people die after being found fit to work by nurses or paramedics working to government targets to get the social security bill down, and dependency on food banks is rising by the day.

Perhaps today's story that mothers about to give birth are being turned away from maternity units across England is supposed to reflect the story of Mary and Joseph being turned away from the inn. Get like Jesus, be born in a stable.

That these people use Christianity at this time of the year is insulting to the religion. Someone needs to say that out loud.
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On a far more cheerful note, our long term reader and contributor, Arbroath, tweeted last night that, after a 5 year battle, her oncologist has just pronounced her cancer free. (She's never mentioned in all her comment on here that she was battling illness so we didn't know till now.)

Now as Christmas present go, you really couldn't ask for more. We're over the moon for you, Arbroath. Munguin is toasting you in his customary vintage champagne. I've got a small Irn Bru!!! (Well, I am quite junior in the organisation.)

Now you have the best Christmas you've ever had.

WE ARE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER , YOU KNOW

Does anyone know why these people's backsides don't seem to fit on bus seats? Are aristocrats made differently from us plebs?

MUNDELL IN A MUDDLE OVER WHEN THE 1990s WERE...

You mean in that last 6 months of the 1990s when parliament was just setting up and Holyrood was a royal palace? DUH!
That's the trouble with choosing your cabinet members from a long list, never mind a short list,  of one!

BREXIT... DO YOU CARE?

I've been interested in politics since for ever.

I really can't imagine why anyone wouldn't be. After all politics, quite literally, rules your life. It makes the laws you have to live by, it decides your taxes, and if your unlucky enough to need them, the benefits you get when you're sick or old or unemployed. It is in charge of your schools, hospitals, roads, rubbish collection...and almost everything else in your life.

There a bits of it that are tedious beyond belief, but, as it regulates every bit of your life, you'd have to be vaguely dense not to take an interest in it. 

(The fact that politicians don't really want you to take an interest should tell you something.)

I've believed for a very long time in an independent Scotland, and I played an enthusiastic, if small, part in the referendum campaign both here with Munguin, and out on the streets.

But for all my interest in politics, I have to say I have virtually no interest in the EU referendum. Maybe it's because I'm so sickened by the broken promises made by Cameron and Gordon Brown that I no longer care what happens to Britian. (Devo max, or devo super max as was promised by a Better Together representative on nationwide tv, has turned out to be a few relatively useless extra powers.) 

I've been a relatively enthusiastic supporter of the EU over the years. I've often been paid a salary from their funds, and I enjoyed an 'employment exchange' through an EU project where I worked at a University in France. In short it has been good to me personally.

But I've also seen many good projects paid for by EU matched social funding; projects that were able to do infinitely more because of money from Europe. I know too, that Scotland gets a far better deal from Europe than does England... Wales and Northern Ireland do even better than Scotland.

That said there are many things wrong with the EU, as there are with any government... not least the idiotic trek between Brussels and Strasbourg. I have no problem with Cameron trying to get one or two little changes made. I'd be happy if he would attack that one.

But, as you might expect for a politician like him, he is doing it all wrong. The whole point of the single market is that rules apply across the Union (the EU plus the countries of EFTA which join to make the European Economic Area). 

The EU doesn't tell people what benefits to pay, what taxes to charge, what their minimum wage should be, or many other things. All it says is that in a single market, what you do for your own people, you must do for others.

So, if you pay in-work benefits to your own population (because the wages are so pathetically low that people can't live on them), then you must do it for people from other EEA countries.

It's not a level playing field... or a single market... if only British people get tax credits, making them the only people who can afford to take low paid work and pay high rents.

Cameron has a problem with his back benchers who have a natural disinclination to like anyone who isn't English...and I do mean English as opposed to British. (Didn't Gideon Osborne say that Scots were a rowdy and disruptive element in the Commons?) 

Tory MPs don't like immigrants and they don't like foreigners telling Brits what to do. After all, the Brits ran a quarter of the world single handed. They don't need some damned foreigner telling them how to run dear old Blighty (or blighted).

I seem to have spent half my life listening to Tories, the Sun, the Daily Mail and Express and the Telegraph blaming everything on the EU, and immigrants, and foreigners in general. There's hardly a day goes by without one of these papers doing their damnedest to stir up racial tensions.

Never mind all the figures that show that EEA immigration has been incredibly good for the economy. Never mind that without them we wouldn't have any plumbers or electricians, our hospitals would fall apart and crops would lie mouldering in the fields.

Cameron will probably fail to get what he wants. Of course a population of 60 million is a huge market (although it seems to me that everything you see in the shops comes from sweat shops in China), so the other countries won't want to lose the UK from the union. But they have made it clear that there will be no treaty changes. These facts would get in the way of a good moan about damned foreigners.

Whatever he comes back with in February, it will not satisfy his Eurosceptic back benchers. And Britain may be moving closer and closer to an exit.

And, you know what? I don't care. There will be advantages and disadvantages of a Brexit, but the disadvantages will be more keenly felt here in the Celtic nations. (Unless the UK government can stump up a considerable amount for Northern Ireland, I can see there being a strong movement in the province, towards Dublin.)

There's a possibility that if Scotland votes heavily to stay in, and England votes to come out, then a second referendum will ensue. I doubt that could be a bad thing. 

Probably for that reason alone I will vote to stay in.

I'd like to know what you guys are feeling about it...