If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s bother and fuss. That’s why I’m not enjoying this week. Every time I turn on the telly I see more bother and fuss. Those poor chaps are stuck down that mine, which can’t be a lot of fun, but in my day we made the most of a bad situation. It seems all I hear nowadays is complaint after complaint.

The truth is we don’t know how lucky we are. Let me tell you about bother. Bother is having your testicle shot off by a Chinaman. Did I complain? Not at the time, because they gave me a good dose of morphine. Sixty years later they’re still firing artillery shells at each other in the same god-forsaken place. Too much bother, I tell you. Foreigners never learn.

But as I get older I realise I’ve seen it all, so I don’t let it bother me. When I do get upset about something I just make myself a cup of tea and put the radio on. That Leighton Smith does wonders at calming my nerves, and after an hour or so at that I realise I’ve no reason to feel bad. It’s not my fault the government gave our country away to immigrants and criminals.

Now these miners are obviously in a pickle, and I don’t expect they can get any radio coverage down there. It might do wonders for them, though, if we could maybe hook Leighton up and get him to talk down the mine shaft.

Failing that we ought to be doing something more to rescue these young fellows. Sending in fancy robots sounds far-fetched to me, when we’ve got perfectly adequate people to do the job. What about all those criminals? Send a few of the ratbags down the hole and tell them they can earn a reduction in their sentence if they do a good job. That ought to clear the prisons out, and who knows, maybe one of them will survive to tell us what’s down there.

The authorities seem to shirk from putting people in the way of harm, though. So why don’t we put a great big hose down the mine and flood it? Surely all the miners will come bobbling up from the bottom, and there will be no more explosion risk with all that water about.

Another thing I can’t stand is bother on the road. I don’t drive that much anymore, because my eyes are shot, but one thing gets my blood pressure going, and it’s people on bikes. When did cyclists become so angry and aggressive? Those Lycra-clad Charlies think they own the road (they don’t, because I do!), so I feel I’m only doing my civic duty when I ram them off the road into the gutter or into parked cars. There’s nothing more pleasing than seeing a distressed cyclist contemplating his twisted wrecked bike.

But cyclists aren’t the only problem. There are just too many nutcases on the road, if you ask me. Just yesterday I was driving down the motorway and not one, but dozens of cars were coming at me from the wrong way. The lunatics need to learn to drive on the right side of the road. It was a miracle I wasn’t killed.

There’s never anything to watch on the telly since that Parkinson fellow retired. So I bought myself one of those iPads. The chap at Dick Smith said I could load hundreds of books onto it. So I went home, got all my books from the bookcase and stacked them on top of it. Do you know the lousy thing cracked! You can imagine the tone of the conversation I had with the fool at Dick Smith the next day when he refused to give me my money back. Young man, I told him, you’ll be hearing from my solicitor.

I couldn’t even remember who my solicitor was. So I got the phone book out. That was a struggle, because my eyes are useless and I have to squint to see the fine print. I don’t like to see lawyers, accountants and other experts, because they won’t give you time of day. All they want to do is be rid of you. They don’t want to hear about how I remember the stretch of road their building was on and how in the 1950s it was only one lane each way, whereas now it’s mayhem and a fellow can’t even walk across the road without being bowled over by some Johnny running a red-light in his fast car, and now you can’t even buy a decent pie without the thing just being filled with gravy, and people just aren’t polite like they used to be.

So I saw an advertisement in the yellow pages for a fellow who described himself as an intellectual property lawyer and patient attorney. Well that sounded just like my cup of tea, even if I usually have no time for intellectual types and their ivory towers. But I am willing to give a chance to anyone who advertises the fact that they are patient. I must say the meeting I had with him was a bit bewildering, but according to the bill I just received he’s filed trade mark applications for me in thirty-seven different countries. Well I guess they may come in handy if I’m ever doing business in Honduras, wherever that is.