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The Gift Shop on the Chateau Lafayette Nile cruiser.

Looking for independent reviews of the Chateau Lafayette Nile cruiser? There are plenty of them online, for example on TripAdvisor. It appears to be quite luxurious, although perhaps a little dated, so they say.

This is NOT a review of the Chateau Lafayette Nile cruiser.


This is a warning to travellers, about the boat’s on-board gift shop. In this shop, there is a very high probability that you will be deliberately over-charged, by which I mean robbed, by the operator. I know this, because they stole a lot of money from my wife.

The owner of the Chateau Lafayette, a Mr Hany Youssef, has told me that he will not do anything about the dishonest acts of the gift shop. Of course, he’s perfectly happy taking rent from them. He accepts no responsibility for the actions of the shop. He even accused me of extortion, when I asked if he would compensate us for the loss. To clarify…

The person running the gift shop deliberately cheats unaccompanied women, and probably everyone else, overcharging them by huge amounts. He rushes his victims into making mistakes, charges in American dollars while pretending the amount is in the much smaller Egyptian currency, and it will be safer to stay out of his shop.

I strongly advise anyone travelling on the Chateau Laffayette Nile cruiser to avoid the gift shop, and to tell their fellow passengers about this shop. 

I know, foreign countries have different concepts of how to do business, and what responsibilities a boat operator has to his customers. But frankly, I see no reason to keep quiet about people who deliberately steal, or people who shrug, and say it’s not their problem, while continuing to take their share of the stolen money. The upset this has caused my wife has been very distressing to see. Morality varies from country to country. In our culture, it is regarded as decent to protect people from being robbed. Not in Egypt, though.

If this warning serves to protect you, please consider making a donation to our “Buy me a coffee” account.


I have also set up a Crowdfunder for this, but I am well aware other charities need money…

Time to reflect, before we carry on.

My Mum and Dad liked children. At least, I suppose they did, because they had five of us. They did a good job of teaching us many important things, including compassion, thinking carefully about things, and cookery. Once, when I expressed pleasure that some unusually revolting public figure had died, Mum told me off. “He was some woman’s son”, she said.

The building site next door has been quiet today. They have been given the day off, because today is the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan Disaster. I was 17 when it happened, and I wept for hours. Thinking about it today, it is still hard to hold back the tears.


The slip of waste coal killed 144 people, including 116 children, who were in the school next to the tip. A hundred and sixteen children. A fund was set up to help, not that there is any way money can compensate for the loss of even a single child, let alone a hundred and sixteen.

Today, fifty years on, as people here quietly remember this disaster, we have millionaires who own tabloid newspapers, and pay truly horrible journalists to write pieces in which they mock the drowning of children fleeing from wars, and claim they were “staged”. When we help refugees, they write demanding the children be X-rayed to prove they are children.

It is not easy to cope with the vicious, right-wing, unpleasantness that is now so common in the UK. It is very depressing to see what so many of us have descended to, after being the heroic nation that helped to save Europe from fascism. But I shall not give up. I shall continue to urge politicians, above all, but everyone else as well, to be decent. 

Comments are off because, sadly, I am only too familiar with the sort of response that thugs make to articles of this kind. 


It’s Madrid, innit?

The first day we were there, we went for a walk… click on the pictures to see larger versions. Offer me money if you want the full resolution ones…

This is a scene in Calle de Gran Via. There is a lot of traffic, but where it was hiding while I took this, I do not know.

Another impressive building, with what I suspect is a modern addition on the top.

This is the Town Hall, I think. I rather liked the “Refugees Welcome” sign on it.

I‘ve no idea what this building is, sorry. It has a sort of anonymous, Ministry of Certain Things, look to it.

The central parts of the city have a very pleasant, well kept, feel to them.

This is the main library and museum, which we visited another day. 

The city has quite a lot of public art, including this stunning bronze frog. 












































More soon…

Bad combover championship.

He’s not fooling anyone but himself, Prince Charles isn’t.

I expect that looks lovely in the mirror, from in front, but one’s footman ought to have told one about the bald dome at the back. It’s nearly as bad as mine.

Perhaps HRH should hide it with a sort of crown thingy?

 In case you can’t tell whose fat neck and bald patch these are, it’s Gideon George Osborne. 


Not a very convincing attempt to comb the hair at the front back over it.

Here, however, is the current World Combover Champion.


He sports a parting on each side, from which the hair above is swept up, forward, back… it’s probably about ten feet long.

An observation about prime ministers’ eyes.

Don’t worry, your Dear Leader will be back soon. I just want to bring back a blast from the past, about prime ministers, that I first mentioned in 2008.

Prime ministers all have strange eyes.

There were, obviously, prime ministers before Grocer Heath, but I start with him because I found this picture disturbing. Ignore, if you can, the stupid slogan behind him. His right eye is looking straight at you, but his left eye is looking at something above you, and a bit to your right.
 
Sorry if I frightened your children, but we have to examine this one. She’s attempting to look cute, with that tilt of the head, but it doesn’t hide the disturbing eyes. Again, the right eye is looking at you. That left eye is doing the same as Grocer’s, checking the thing hovering over your right shoulder. You may be in more danger than you think… 
Don’t look round now!
 
 

Here we see John Major, a man with a very strange upper lip, squinting. He’s trying to hide the way his right eye isn’t actually looking at you, unlike his left eye.
You may be tempted to wonder whether Mrs Currie saw both of his eyes wide open, but that way lies madness. And a court case if you say too much.
 
Besides, the next picture is a shocker…
 
 
It is hard to convince oneself that this man is sane. I’m not even going to try. He was a Tory at Oxford, and has told big lies to start a war. Which of those eyes do you think is looking at you? 
 
Still, if you want an example of how to get even wealthier while messing the country up, you would have a long way to go to find a better one.
 
 
 
 
Yes, I do know that Gordon Brown is blind in his left eye, due to an injury playing rugby. I’m sure I should be very slightly sympathetic about it, as he never made a fuss about it. But it’s just a game, rugby, right?
 
[I live in Wales, and I would like to make it quite clear that that was a joke. Rugby is extremely serious and important, as everyone knows.]
 
 
 

And that brings us to the current incumbent. He looks at the camera with his left eye, while the right gazes into the distance, in search of more of your property to privatise. Notice, too, that he is doing the sex-doll mouth. He has two other settings: the one where he pretends to have no lips at all, and the one where he puts his tongue between his lips. 
 

In the first of these three, he is in the middle of telling us that he has lowered the national debt from £8 billion to £1.5 trillion, for which we are expected to thank him. In the second, he is trying to remember which football club he is supposed to pretend to support, and in the third, he is waiting for a carefully vetted supporter to finish asking the question they have been given to read out.
 
No, I don’t like any of the people on this page. 
 
How did you guess?

The Dear Leader’s Diary- 15



I am getting rather annoyed at the way some people out there are using what they imagine to be humour to attempt to attack me. For instance, here is

something somebody has done, when they should have been working hard, which takes one of my jolly important speeches, and uses it in a sort of comic.


When I said that, I was clearly not wanting people to realise that it meant that we would be actively intolerant. Intolerant of crime, intolerant of the causes of crime, to quote my good friend Tory Blair. It’s really unfair when the stuff my speech-writers invent is taken to be the policy of our totally united party, with its enormous majority of four.


We are going to make prudent cuts reforms to all sorts of wasteful spending like pensions and benefits, whether you obey the law or not,  and I will not tolerate these unpleasant attacks. Active intolerance is going to get you, if you dare criticise us!





The Dear Leader’s Diary – Episode 14















I have visited Nicola Sturgeon in Scotland, as a reward for destroying the Labour vote there. I am showing my commitment to a UK that includes Scotland, by promising them many new powers that will let them feel as if they

have achieved something. I have already vowed to promise to make a pledge to put something or other in the Queen’s Speech about this. I can promise my own people that I will have anything we don’t like removed from the internet as soon as we feel like it. Playing people off against each other for my own benefit shows what a superior statesman I am, and why I continue to be trusted.


Meanwhile, I have found a book labelled “Bastards” in a cupboard in one of the many kitchens at my house in Downing Street. I shall write the name of Mr

David Davis in it, as it appears he thinks he has the right to attack my decision to abolish Human Rights. Worse still, he is hinting that taking away peoples’ rights and replacing them with vaguely worded promises, vows, and pledges is likely to prove divisive. By that, he probably means that he should have been leader, instead of me, so that he could unite our party. Unless he can split away a huge number of my MPs, as many as three or four, he will not be able to prevent us ramming any change we like through.


My friend Mr Kim Jong Un has recently had his defence minister shot with an anti-aircraft gun. Members of my party who are not feeling at least 100% faithful would do well to remember Britain probably still has a gun, too.

The Dear Leader’s Diary – Lucky 13th episode

I am going to have to start using my active intolerance™ much sooner than I had expected,as it has emerged that some of my MPs think they can argue with me about my policies. Back benchers have been talking to something called the Belfast Telegraph, which I will not tolerate.

One Conservative backbencher said plans were “legally incoherent” and predicted Mr Cameron would face a Commons defeat if he attempted to make anything more than cosmetic changes to the current laws.
“If what emerges is a lot of sound and fury but no attempt to fiddle with fundamental rights as set down by the  Convention then what we have is the Human Rights Act in all but name and that will be fine,” they said.
“But if there is any fundamental attempt to move away from that position then it will be dead in the water. Any such proposals will be torn to shreds by people like Dominic Grieve and many others who actually understand how our constitution works.”

I am now going to have to find out which of my MPs have been talking to newspapers without permission, and undermining my entirely reasonable plans.



In the meantime, I have asked George to announce all sorts of proposals, in order to take attention away from the Human Rights Act, so I can get rid of it when nobody is looking. He came back from the bathroom grinning, and announced a bold plan to stop us needing to finance English cities, by making them responsible for local transport, housing, planning, policing and public health. These are all things they can feel proud they are managing for themselves, and we won’t need to finance them any more.


It is certainly good to have George on the team, and not briefing against me to the press, like the sneaky back benchers, that I shall be sorting out soon.

The Dear Leader’s Diary – 12

Now that my government is all powerful, and will do whatever we want, forever, I am an even more Dear Leader than Kim Jong Un, and have asked my web team to produce a suitably powerful new header for this Diary. You are instructed to like it at once, or there will be trouble.

Britain has been “passively tolerant” for far too long, and we should not leave people to live their lives as they please as long as they obey the law. That just isn’t good enough. I am getting Mrs May to produce a list of measures that we will impose to teach you some respect. This will show those people who said we were a bunch of tin-pot fascists that they were wrong. 

In our glorious future, it will be an offence to hold minority “extremist” views that differ from Britain’s consensus. You will be told which opinions are acceptable, and we will crack down on anyone who is considering beginning to think any of these thoughts. Laughing at me, my government, or any of our very good ideas will result in severe punishment.



Enough of that for now. I should not have had to tell you the correct things to think in the first place. See that you do not continue to wrong-think.