It’s been a goodly while since I had a proper rant. Talk of programming and websites can grate upon one occasionally, and I have found my website a rather effective form of stress relief, and somewhat less migraine inducing than my other stress relief technique of banging my head rhythmically upon a hard surface. The burning question du jour is of course what in fact I should rant about. No-one has really upset me this past week. Well, no-one that I can rant about here without it getting back to them anyway.

I don’t have to look far to find something to moan about though. If, like me, you have a pre-disposition to being something of a grumpy old fart, then we are at least living in the right place. Britain is a hole isn’t it? What a dump. So, so many things to have a good rant about that it seems a shame to pick only one. So I won’t.

Let’s start with tax shall we? We’ve all got to pay it. Death and taxes and all that. What I would be particularly keen to know is, what extra am I getting from Ilminster Town Council to justify the 12% hike in their share of my council tax this year? In fact, since I have been married (almost 8 years now), which is about as long as I can remember, council tax has risen significantly above inflation each year, whereas the level of service we receive has dropped similarly significantly.

The one thing I do care about is that the council picks up my rubbish on time, but clearly that is far too difficult a task. The recycling collection is a joke. They won’t take cardboard, or plastic. They won’t even take your paper if you put it in a plastic bag in an effort to prevent it from turning into pulp in the rain and blowing around the estate. What they will do instead, is leave a plasticky tag on your bin telling you that they basically can’t be arsed to do any real recycling. They probably won’t even recycle the tag if I leave it for them. What they will do is park their stupid truck in the worst possible place, a place carefully chosen to cause as much disruption and inconvenience to everyone else as they possibly can.

These self-obsessed do-gooders (doing very little good) are more interested in pushing their environmental agenda down our throats, rather than actually taking our recycling and doing something about it. Yeah, we get it. We want to recycle – you just make it awkward for us. So instead, we hugely increase our carbon footprint by lugging all our card and plastic packaging to the recycling centre ourselves every week.

Speaking of carbon footprints and driving cars, what the heck is going on with petrol? Price of oil going up my ass. Here’s what’s really happening: all the garages whack on an extra penny per litre every fortnight, and we carry on buying petrol. Then because the government sees the petrol companies turning healthy profits, they think they will dip their filthy fingers into the pot as well, and whack another 2 pence per litre in fuel duty onto the price we pay. Are these people so stupid as to think this is a sensible policy for reducing congestion on our roads? Come on! You’ve got to be kidding?!

We all have to drive our cars, and there will come a point when people simply won’t pay the price any more. Gangs of wild middle aged businessmen will roam the motorways looking for tankers of fuel to rob and sell on the black market. A whole industry of illegal biofuels will spring up, and the government will have absolutely no control.

Ignore the fact that cars amount to less than 5% of carbon pollution in this country. We, the drivers, are the soft target.

I sold a part of my company recently, and received a payment for my shares. I have paid tax on my income through the company. The company has paid tax on all the employee’s incomes, including mine. The company has paid tax on its own income. Whereas the government has done absolutely nothing to support our small business, which makes a valuable contribution to the local economy along with all the other small businesses. The tax breaks promised for filing returns online have never materialised. What a surprise. So, I have earned some extra cash for all my hard work – all those late nights and 70 hour weeks. Will I get to keep all this money? Of course not, Mr Greedy Taxman has his fingers poised over my pocket ready to take his “share”.

I did a calculation the other day that if I lived in America and earned the same money that I do now, converted at today’s exchange rate, I would be over $600 better off per month. That’s more than £300. And that’s before I go and fill up the car…

Americans are moaning and bitching about paying $3.79 per gallon. I filled up yesterday at £1.14 per litre, which equates to $8.45 per US gallon. Americans waste huge amounts of fuel with their crappy high displacement engines that manage less HP per CC than the average European lawnmower, and yet they still get to pay petrol prices that we haven’t seen in the UK for upwards of 15 years.

It’s not like my rant has a purpose either. I have no political inclinations. No human government will ever cure the world’s ills, and Britain has not just been flushed down the toilet – it’s been through the sewage works and is floating out to sea like the turd it is.

So, it doesn’t matter to me which mentally deficient retard is in power – just so long as someone can hook me up with some cheap petrol.

Rant over. For now.