Animals in Pubs

In a Widnes pub t'other week I met two lovely baby guinea pigs at the bar and all the punters enjoyed having them about so why do people generally dissaprove of beasts in pubs?


At the end of the day we are all animals so I see no reason against opening the doors of public houses to our furry friends. In yet another Widnes pub a black and white cat befriended me, rubbing against my legs, pandering for a stroke and a tickle under the chin, he even followed me out of pub when the mild had been drunk.


No doubt some folk will plead allergies, it seems a new fashion to claim that certain things you don't like eating or touching or being within 20 miles of will leave you bed-ridden and diseased. Peanuts are still eaten in pubs and people manage so they would survive inhaling fumes of dog hair.


There are still good working-class boozers dotted around the rest of Lancashire where locals are allowed to bring there dogs in and other punters on the whole are comfortable with this and often make a fuss of the hound. Strangely though a Yorkshireman once came into a pub with a lovely yellow Labrador but the fellow got a bit narky when folk stroked his animal and tried to avoid the other tipplers as best he could, a strange strategy to pursue when you enter a PUBLIC house though I suppose there's nowt as queer as Yorkshire folk.


A pub mascot that seems to have disappeared is the caged bird despite the fact talking parrots always entertain, perhaps we could stop pubs closing by putting animal mascots in to attract custom as long as they're are looked after as I wouldn't advocate going back to having dancing bears at the tavern door. I was once exposed to a foreign rag from Northumberland which contained an article about a horse coming in for a drink of beer with one of the local farmers so if you have any stories about strange animals in pubs please leave a comment I'm sure folk would be interested to hear about them.   

Council Cock-Up Merchants

Why does nobody question the way local councils have become obsessed with advertising to outside investors to the detriment of the locals many of whom are council tax-payers who often disagree with the change. They waste money on updating signs with their 'brand' on it, silly logos and mottos e.g. 'It's all happening in Halton', 'St Helens-A place where Everyone Matters' etc.

All councils are interested in is money, the people in charge often live outside the boundaries and don't have to face the dreadful eyesores that developers throw up at their go ahead. They don't even negotiate with the companies to employ local labourers, infact Warrington Council bigged-up how many jobs would be created by building a new bus station but at the construction the contractor brought over all its own folk from the wrong side of the Pennines (Yorkshire) even down to the tea boys and ring-fenced the work away from Warringtonians.

Here in Widnes they are building yet another bridge so people can come and steal our jobs, block up our roads on the way to Liverpool and probably cause more unnecessary visits from southerners who become council leaders and work from the inside to destroy all our heritage and memories, backed-up by Tory-voting snobs who are easily bought for support by quotes of how many millions will be invested in the area, these figures are nonsense, anyone with any gumption would see that the cost goes on planning and building and very little if any money will trickle down to the people of Widnes or even Lancashire in general. Also many of the jobs will again go to outsiders and the snobs will still be shocked that there is local unemployment due to this.

We should have a jobs amnesty where people stop communiting and just swap jobs so people and live and work in their own town and be able to have a better chance of having their say locally of course it wouldn't happen coz very few companies like to train folk, they just want a gobshite with a piece of fancy bog-roll from university and so we would have to scrap further education and make everyone do proper jobs in factories and train the longest-serving workers gradually into better jobs.

Bad Geography

The past couple of tuesdays I have tuned into the rot box watch 'Secrets from the Workhouse' on ITV to see some poncy actors try unconvincingly to show how shocked they are that their own ancestors were incarcerated in workhouses. I watched to see what these places were like inside as I was born in old Whiston Hospital in south Lancashire which was originally built as Prescot Union Workhouse in 1842 and having lived in a homeless hostel I have an interest in the lineage and history of institutions for relief of the poor.
                                                                                                                                                                          Even if I could get over the soppy celebrities with plummy accents I cannot for a moment tolerate yet another blow to our cultural identity by a program supposedly interested in heritage. By this I mean the ignorant way they state that the Lancashire districts of Dalton-in-Furness and Ulverston are in 'Cumbria', a local authority created in the 1970's that DID NOT replace the historic county boundaries, only the local governance of the area. So why must history programmes say bollocks such as Stan Laurel is Cumbrian, he isn't, he's Lancastrian and by eck back when he entered the world there was no confusion where his hometown of Ulverston was.

It sickens me to see local authorities, local newspapers and educational establishments getting such things wrong when they profess to care about their localities but it is mind-boggling that bodies apparently formed to defend heritage including museums, conservation groups and re-enactment societies have no care for the facts of geography. They print rubbish like the Battle of Towton, North Yorkshire, it's in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the corporation dustmnen weren't around then to clean up the corpses.

Education is being perverted by divvys who even mistake their own birthplaces. Please see the Friends of Real Lancashire website for proof that no legislation has changed our historic county borders.