There are rules and procedures for everything these days - but I have very little time for them.

Sainsbury's supermarket in Chester tried to batter me down with their rules and regulations the other day, but I fought on, stood my corner - and won!

The problem was I had been very distracted at one of their check-outs, and so I'd forgotten to accept back from the cashier my bank card. I got the cashback, the goods and the receipt, but forgot to grab my card.

NO-ONE should be surprised at the dismal failure of public transport on Merseyside - as confirmed by the most recent figures.

Merseyrail trains might run on time, more or less, but that is only because they travel at such low speeds and the services are infrequent.

I've checked in the old timetables, and trains were faster and more frequent between Liverpool and New Brighton 100 YEARS AGO than they are now!

I've been told off, by a guy called Ken, for not posting anything since way back in November.

What can I tell you? I've been feeling fed-up, somewhat disillusioned by the utter crapness of life in contemporary Britain.

Plus I had a visit to Wigan that sent my spirits crashing even lower.

When I feel like that, I'm not minded to write much, apart from the occasional piece of bitter and twisted poetry.

However, I've been moved to get blogging again - by a visit to the "festive" Continental Market held in Liverpool city centre.

I nearly didn't make it to the Bards of New Brighton poetry session on Monday night ... because my crap car decided to die on the road to hell (M53) in south Wirral.

The AA Patrol Man found me clinging to a conifer where the highway divides - freezing my nuts off and having an asmtha attack.

I remember grabbing his arm and gushing tearfully: "This is a nightmare; I absolutely MUST get to a poetry meeting in Wallasey."

Quick as a flash, and with a grin big enough to accommodate a whole Burton's Wagon Wheel without blistering the chocolate-flavoured coating, he replied: "Now THAT'S what I call an emergency!"'

I know I shouldn't have been, but I was absolutely amazed at the sheer exuberance of Reds fans' celebrations after Liverpool beat Man U.

I saw whooping and cheering and wild dancing and beer spilled everywhere - and that was just people watching on a TV screen in a pub. What must the home crowd have been like at Anfield?

Shame on the BBC for giving a platform to people who would deny the dignity and worth of a fellow human being - and trample over free speech.

Yes, the bullying approach adopted by the Justice Secretary Jack Straw, Tory Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Liberal-Democrat MP Chris Huhne and the American writer Bonnie Greer on last night's Question Time was an affront to decency.

And the BBC top brass should not have allowed the show's usual format to be hijacked and used as a nasty and counter-productive show trial of BNP chairman Nick Griffin.

I don't much like Nick Griffin, frankly, and I don't at all care for his politics, but if he is to be invited on Question Time (and I think it right that he was, as a democratically elected politician) then at least he should have been allowed to properly answer the questions put to him.

Driving back from Liverpool "John Lennon" Airport (which I still call Speke Airport) on Tuesday (20 October) at about 11.10pm I noticed what appeared to be a new and HUGE building down on the Pier Head.

Turned out it was the Queen Mary 2, lit up like a Christmas tree, as she prepared to sail out into the bay. Her visit to Liverpool caused great excitement.

They were still talking about the ship when me and Posh Boots got back home to New Brighton and sashayed straight into Hell's Waiting Room for a nightcap at about 11.45pm.

I'd been meaning, for a long time, to do some serious cleaning, tidying and minor repairs at my flat in New Brighton.

But I have to psyche myself up for such activities. It is, after all, so much easier to let things slide on the domestic; to drift into easy-queasy squalor.

Especially for a poet and an artist, such as moi!

But soon, I'm supposed to host a monthly meeting of the New Brighton Educative Wine Tasting Society (NEWTS for short!) at my place, so the incentive has been around for some time for the Big Clean-Up.

SOMEWHERE between the purity of the angels and the savagery of beasts - a wise man once remarked - there exists politics.

Meaning ... angels can get by without governance and civil regulations and so can wild beasts. But humans cannot.

The philosopher Aristotle put it this way ... man is a political animal. He meant that if we were all allowed to act as unfettered individuals, following selfish impulses, the result would be chaos and carnage. Quite right...

Buit the trouble is so many of us now despise politics and politicians ... and with very good cause...

OF COURSE the North West Development Agency should be scrapped - but we don't need lessons in efficiency and cost savings from the Liberal-Democrat leader of Liverpool City Council, Warren Bradley.

That the entire country is suffocating under a thick smog of publicly-funded bureaucracy - which at the managerial end is obscenely overpaid - has been obvious to anyone with any intelligence for many years.

But Cllr Wearing Badly, and his pathetic little political party, want the NWDA and the other regional development agencies abolished so that £2.3bn saved annually can be redistributed to... you've guessed it ... councils.