I have always thought making lists was a rather poor excuse for ignoring the important and doing the trivial or the merely urgent, but here goes:

Joys of summer!

1] Blue skies and mist rising on the hills on clear mornings

2] Local fresh strawberries, home grown lettuce especially in a Caesar salad with really good parmesan cheese from the Cheese Shop in nearby Blairgowrie.

3] Neighbours dogs barking at each other for hours on otherwise quiet afternoons and ruining my much needed siesta and my wife's much needed rest.

4] The still uncompleted and unoccupied bungalow which blocks our view of the bridge over the village burn. At the latest estimate the building has been under construction for around 4 years!

5] Petrol prices rising through the roof - we will soon reach the £5 per gallon level - only they stopped putting the price per gallon on the pump many years ago only leaving the price per litre. I really don't see why I should be forced to multiply by 4.5 something. It is equally annoying that the government takes 80% of the price and none of them have yet been suspended from lamp posts.

6] Terrorism, or rather the display of public hypocrisy which has up until now prevented measures being taken which may well have prevented it. I believe we should return to the death penalty, particularly for acts of treason and terrorism asap. If we are in a war against terrorism (although it seems a particularly asymmetric form of warfare), then let us get serious about winning it. There is always the risk of creating martyrs but on balance that is preferable to blowing up ordinary people in tube tunnels and on buses.

7] On the same topic, if a particular ethnic group establishes a record of producing, harbouring, aiding and abetting, for whatever reason, terrorists, then it is only reasonable that they come under some pretty intense scrutiny as to their loyalties, beliefs, behaviour, and whether they might not be happier living somewhere else, and if I hear another politico mouthing off about our much vaunted "multicultural society" and "human rights" I do believe I shall be physically sick. They should have been asked to clean up after the London Tube bombers.

8] The BBC whose determination never to offend anyone who isn't anglo saxon has led them into new nadirs of news reporting. There are some times when objectivity just does not fit the need. As the events of the two days of bombing in London unfolded the best reporting (as usual these days) came from CNN.

9] At the risk of being accused of rural isolationism from the troubles that afflict our inner cities, is there any excuse for our politicians to go off on 80 day holidays while the country is being attacked? Can you imagine it? Business as usual is the excuse, but one hopes that somebody in Whitehall is hard at work doing something useful.

10} And last, but by no means least, why is it so difficult not to believe that Windows is the most stupid piece of software ever to have been foisted on we simple consumers? Having been lent a laptop running XP Pro with SP2 I discovered that its internal modem would not work. The solution (according to Windows) is to update a particular driver. How? By connecting to the internet of course! But wasn't that why I wanted the modem to work? Aaaaaaaaarghhh!