Was August Aweful or Awesome. Grumpy's Alternative News.

Lets start with the idiots, they never seem to go away. Our so called 'rulers' get no better. I am less than impressed that Cabinet minister Cheryl Gillan has got back the £4.47 pence that she claimed for dog food during the expenses scandal. Equally pathetic, new MP Yasmin Qureshi, banned for using a mobile phone whilst driving. Not a first offence I might add. Plus she had no insurance. Add Rory Stewart's (MP for Penrith) pathetic comments that his constituents are pretty primitive people who walk around with trousers held up by baling twine and you realise, regarding parliament, nothing changes. Gruesome, greedy people out of touch with the real world.

Councils didn't let us down when it came to waste and stupidity. Brighton purchased a machine to count bicycles, cost £25,000. Only it can't tell the difference between a bike and a car. Brighton and Hove council paid consultants £300,000 to teach it 'value for money'. Binmen in Gloucester have had to have police protection from angry householders. The binmen have been ordered to leave bins where the lid won't close; it is alleged in one case the lid was only a centimetre from being fully closed. And a seventy four year old in Plymouth was banned from taking his two pet owls on the streets as 'they might attack someone'. A decision later rescinded.

I think the country of the month was undoubtedly France. Taxi drivers in Paris were voted worst in the world in an internet poll. Frederique Messmer, a Paris taxi driver's response said it all. 'I'm unpleasant and so what' was his answer as he enjoyed his cigarette in his taxi. (London's black cabs came out top.) Plus the French police had a busy month. They had to warn the public concerning holiday makers being being attacked by cows near Font- Romeu in the Pyrenees. They also had to deal with a woman in Lyons who put the body of her partner, still dressed in his pyjamas amongst the frozen peas in the deep freeze. And they are still looking for two nuns in their eighties who are on the run after refusing to move to a nursing home two hundred and fifty miles from the school where they worked. They sound hard pressed, the French police. No wonder they have abolished the height restriction of 5ft 3in (1.6m). Damn, I could have joined (I'm 5.4in). Any age restrictions chaps, I'm seventy? It's not that old, honest, even if British judges have suggested no-one should be allowed to sit on a jury after becoming seventy. Come on, we're not done for yet, Rod Stewart's wife is expecting and he's sixty six! (It will be his seventh.)

I notice animals were used by drug traffickers as guards thousands of miles apart; bears in the mountains of British Columbia and an albino python in Rome. I noticed also they are trying to get the two-toed sloth in London Zoo to breed. Mind you, its last partner they chose was also male. There's been no sloth born at the zoo for more than one hundred years, so don't hold your breath. But the animal story of the month was undoubtedly the women who put the cat in the bin in Coventry. Forty five years of age, a church going spinster who works in a bank, how ordinary is that. So she puts a cat in a wheelie bin in full view of a surveillance camera. How extraordinary is that. Something she will never forget, or be allowed to forget. A life changing experience in a split second. I wonder why.

Two mind bending morbid incidents from the month. A groom in Turkey lost control of a AK-57 as he fired it in celebration at the wedding, killing three and wounding eight others. And one of the only two competitors left in the World Sauna Championships in Helsinki died after suffering severe burns. Contestants had to sit in 110c (230F). Surprise, surprise, they are not going to hold the competition any more.

That's about it. But not wishing to end on a sombre note, two items that probably shouldn't, but made me smile. A woman is suing Walt Disney World, claiming that she was 'groped' by 'Donald Duck' at the Epcot theme park. Now I know its not funny if it did in fact happen. But surely there's a problem here. How on earth is she going to positively identify her assailant!

Finally, did you see the 'one liners', jokes submitted for the prize of 'best joke award' at the Fringe, Edinburgh Festival.

Entries include

As a kid I was made to walk the plank. We couldn't afford a dog.

Dave drowned. So at the funeral we got him a wreath in the shape of a lifebelt. Well it's what he would have wanted. Both Gary Delaney.

I bought one of those anti-bullying wristbands when they first came out. I say 'bought'- I actually stole it off a short, fat ginger kid. Jack Whitehall.

I picked up a hitchhiker. You gotta when you hit them. Emo Philips

And finally, the winner.

I've just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I'll tell you what, never again. Tim Vine

Lost, or was it Forgotten.

Today's Times includes the story of the airline passenger who, travelling from Tel Aviv to Paris with five children, his wife and eighteen pieces of luggage, managed to leave one of the children behind.

One's immediate reaction is to be horrified at such incompetent parenting but is that necessarily fair? 'Let him who is without sin' and all that springs to mind.

I remember as a proud father of a two year old visiting the local pub with two friends for a convivial couple of hours. Only to remember after the first pint that we had been left in charge of the infant who was fast asleep in bed, blissfully unaware of our wilful neglect. All three of us were teachers at the time but still hopelessly inadequate beings it seems. Our wives were unimpressed with our dereliction of duty and we were all reminded of it for many a day.

As a teacher also I remember taking, with twenty other staff, five hundred secondary school pupils in eight non too luxurious buses to Drayton Manor for an end of term treat. (Alton Towers declined to accept such numbers on one trip and I don't blame them.) We returned with four hundred and ninety seven. The missing three returned under their own steam some time later. It was all very reminiscent of the 'Albert and the Lion' saga though with a less serious ending. Ironically one of the three tragically drowned in a local river days after the school term ended.

I remember too as a youth leader returning from Blackpool to Derby after a youth club outing minus one young lady. I had to knock on the door of her parent's house and explain we had lost the daughter they had lovingly brought up for the past sixteen years. Not funny, I can assure you, even less funny when she arrived home hours later, having found a 'young man' on another trip from Derby and travelled home with her new found friend on their bus.

Contrary to what people might think we were and hopefully still are conscientious if sometimes flawed individuals. But times have changed and in this 'Madeleine McCann' era woe betide any mistake by those in charge, be they parent or teacher. Sometimes, just sometimes I'm glad I'm just an old fool whose main occupation in life is merely watching the world go by. Or is it only me that did daft things; you tell me.