Blog 222

Inflation is nothing new but is really a very strange phenomenon and I do wonder that there seems no way of controlling it. What has made me think of it is looking at the current price of theatre tickets in London. I know The Royal Opera House has always had sky-high prices but ordinary west end theatres now seem to be as exorbitant. For example the top price for ‘Dirty Dancing’ is £65. So a couple going to see this show will fork out £130 just for the tickets. God forbid they should take a taxi to the theatre and home again because if they did, even living fairly central, they could reckon to fork out another thirty to forty pounds. Drinks in the interval could add another ten at least and if they should they want to make it a real night out and have a meal that would add another eighty or even a whole lot more. So the grand total would be a minimum of £250! Four visits to the theatre and you’ve spent a thousand quid. Question – is it worth it?
And I worried that the price of my autobiography was too high.
I don’t know why England is bemoaning the loss of the world football to Russia when they have the Olympic Games to look forward to ha ha ha! I have just been reading what the International Olympic Committee requires of a host country and the mind simply boggles. It is no wonder Greece is still trying to recover six years later. England would have done much better I feel to have let Paris take on the burden because, celebration though it may be, burden it certainly is, despite worldwide television coverage and mega-millions of sponsorship and advertising. In fact the list of requirements and do’s and don’ts is so long I think I’ll leave it for now and give it a whole Blog to itself. Though even that might not be enough.
I think the storm we experienced a couple of nights ago, bad as it seemed, must have been on the periphery of the much more violent manifestation further east. At least 18 people have died in accidents caused by storms in Egypt, dozens more were injured in road accidents and when buildings collapsed after being battered by sandstorms and rain. Fierce winds, heavy rains and snow have lashed eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern countries for several days. The storms have sunk a ship off the Israeli coast, closed ports and disrupted shipping in the Suez Canal.rescue workers pulled the bodies of six workers out of the debris of a factory building that had collapsed in the northern city of Alexandria on Sunday. The state-owned al-Ahram newspaper said the heavy rains had damaged the structure of the factory. The paper reported that several other buildings had collapsed across Egypt, causing more deaths. The storms have ended a long drought in Lebanon, Syria and Israel and came just a week after more than 40 people died in a forest fire near Israel's northern port of Haifa.. Waves of up to 10m (33ft) battered coasts, damaging fishing boats in Lebanon. In Syria, snow blanketed the streets of the capital, Damascus, and closed roads.
And all we had to put up with was a blackout and a little bit of flooding, and freezing temperatures of course.