Well, that was a week wasn’t it. All seven weird wacky days of it. We had grown men in the shape of Rugby Union referee, Craig Joubert, running like a big wet pansy off the pitch, after awarding Australia a ‘non-penalty’ in the dying minutes of last weekends Quarter final of the 2015 World Cup.
We had the visit of the Chinese Leader, Xi Jinping, and his wife, Peng, who’s a well known folk singer in the Chinese state apartment block. They met David Cameron, the Queen and Jeremy Corbyn. If only they’d added Chris Eubank and a Dalek to that list, they’d have had the full gamete of British life. 😎

With Christmas fast approaching, both the Chinese premier and the Queen set the trends for gift ideas to the British public, with Xi Jinping receiving recordings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the Queen receiving two of Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng’s, folk cd’s. These will surely top Drones and Call of Duty BlackOps 3 for the XBox at the top of the Xmas gift charts!

China is growing at such a fast rate, the average population height will be five foot eight inches tall by 2050. Xi also told us it was not China’s fault that steel prices had fallen to the point where many steel plants in the UK were being forced to announce plant closures or redundancies.

When quizzed on the matter Xi Jinping stated……..

“I want to answer the steel question. The world is seeing an oversupply [of steel] following the financial crisis. China also has overcapacity,” he said. “We have taken a series of steps [to remedy this]. We have cut 700m tonnes of production capacity. You can imagine the task of finding jobs for those workers.”

700 MILLION TONNES!!!! Jinping……what on earth were you doing mate? That’s enough steel to build a bridge to bloody Mars man! I think he was exaggerating as the New Statesman quoted annual production as ‘1.6 billion tonnes’ with China supplying around half. What Jinping didn’t say was, as China’s own economy slows, it’s State subsidised steel has flooded global markets slashing prices to the point where again the New Statesman quotes

“In July, it was reported that steel was cheaper per tonne than cabbage”

Now, I’m not a steel commodities expert, but, ‘cheaper per tonne than cabbage’ sounds cheap to me. So far there has been no news of cabbage growers across Europe jumping from steel bridges. That’ll probably be next week.

David Cameron also touched on Cybersecurity. In the week that Talk Talk’s security systems had been breached by a 12 year old Russian boy using a Raspberry Pi, it was topical that Dave the Rave should broach the subject. He stated “the cyber agreement is a first step towards wider potential security cooperation between China and the UK, in which each country will agree not to condone or conduct spying on each other’s intellectual property and confidential corporate information.”
Dave……c’mon…..China and Copying are almost anagrams in a bad edition of Countdown! Apart from fireworks and terracotta soldiers, which were definitely invented by the chinese, it has spent the last 50 years copying everything from jeans to i-pads to space rockets. If they stop stealing data from the West they’ll be growing only cabbage within ten years. Then the price of cabbage on the commodity markets will plunge below steel, UK cabbage growers will be out in the streets and it’ll all go belly up once more.

I mentioned Chris Eubank earlier. Younger readers won’t know who he is, but he’s famous for his lisp, and owning a big motherf***er truck. He also did a bit of boxing and likes dressing a bit dapper of a day. I don’t know him personally, but he’s always been nothing but entertaining. Well, having not heard of him for a while, he popped into the news this week, with the announcement, that, to avoid confusion with his boxing son, Chris Eubank Jr, he wants to be called ‘English’, in deference to his Dad, who’s nickname it was. I was going to say ‘We love you English’ but as a Scot………. 🙂

The news that ruined some people’s weekend, was the World Health Organisation’s announcement that eating processed meats increases your chances of colorectal cancer by 18%. The fact I was eating a bacon roll at the time added to my misery, resulting in a Heimlich manoeuvre of tectonic proportions. I had to eat a sausage roll and beans to calm me down!!
The thing is, the risk of you getting colorectal cancer is still low. Are you going to avoid bacon for the rest of your life? A quick flick through this website http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/causes.html suggests 2% of us will cop it due to cancer of the colon which is less than those dying from the flu……get that feckin grill on, a bacon sarnie beckons 🙂

The BBC website announced that ‘character bento’ was trending. Character bento i hear you ask?…..what’s that? Well, you know how you go to a restaurant and ‘you want to see a nice plate of food Johnny’. In Japan apparently they’ve taken ‘a nice plate of food’ just a wee bit too far.
I’ve never been to Japan, but have heard from friends who’ve been there, about ‘bento boxes’. People working there, returned to tell me they had tried Japanese bento boxes but found them ‘disgusting’. Full of cold things and slime. Luckily, they were supplied with ‘European Bento boxes’ I thought this would consist of a cold sausage roll, a packet of Cheese crisps and a Mars bar with a little bottle of red cola. However, it simply consisted of more cold stuff and less slime.
But, the entrepreneurial Japanese, have come up with this……….

Yes, Bento box food with cute little faces on. Apparently it started in a karaoke bar in Tokyo when some young Tokyo-ites got off their face on saki. Things have never looked back! The Bento boxes taste exactly the same, but at least you have something nice to look at whilst you hunt for a McDonalds 🙂 you can read more here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-34610320

My week I hear you ask…..:-) Well. I did more boring things than you can shake a stick at. Hunted for red squirrels as we’ve had our first ever visitor to our garden. I spent some time writing a 3000 word story called ‘Luke’s Escape’ as part of The Village Gossip series.

I had Sandra, star of #Gogglebox follow me ( I should point out she does follow a lot of people 🙂 ). I also sketched a woodpecker and tweeted away merrily all week. I really should get out more 🙂

‘Dave’s Week’ was brought to you by Dave aka qosfc1919 on Twitter © Dodo Productions 2015 – you can email me at davidlinden4@gmail.com