Cleveleys News

Hello loves. No “ooooh” from me today, as I’m saving my breath. You never know when that nasty virus will come and take your breath away, do you? It’s a serious business this Covid-19 malarkey, especially if you’re elderly and vulnerable. “Lockdown lunacy” my son keeps calling it, no idea where he's got that from, and frankly I think he’s talking twaddle. When you look at the number of deaths per population it doesn’t always seem so serious, but the clever people at Cleveleys News that let me write this blog (lovely lads, I say lads, they’re probably retired but still younger than me) pointed out last week that when you look at the numbers of people in hospital in comparison to those coming out of hospital alive, the ratio isn’t good at all. It’s the old and vulnerable that get hospitalised with this, and despite the best efforts of our lovely NHS (I always give them my clap you know), once you’re poorly enough to be in there, the odds aren’t good. Keep isolated, that's what...

Dr Jen Durr, Cleveleys News Medical Correspondent Want to know about a diet that will guarantee you lose 257 pounds in one year? Easy. The one that costs £4.95 a week. I know - not the kind of pounds you were hoping to lose. Modern life makes it all too easy for people to get massively, massively overweight. Cheap foods full of saturated fat and sugars coupled with hours every night spent sedentary in front of a Netflix box-set is pretty much a recipe for obesity. We binge on TV, and we binge on food. Statistics for Blackpool published in 2014 showed that 31% of adults were obese and 44% of adults were just plain old-fashioned overweight, meaning that a whopping three-quarters of all adults in the area are heavier than they ought to be. No wonder then that Blackpool’s local amateur publication The Gazette has teamed up with Slimming World to promote their diet regime through a series of inspirational articles about local people losing weight. Dieting is big business. Sli...

Oooooh hello there loves, it’s me, Dee Dee, local blogger here once again to tell you how things are and how things should be. Well! What a year 2020 is turning out to be, eh? My son assured me that Brexit would fix Britain’s broken politics, but I voted for it, we got out of Europe, and now we’re all locked inside our houses fearing for our lives! Not at all what I was promised, and I shall be having some stern words with our lad about this just as soon as I come out of isolation. He’s naughty, he is. As I can’t go out to find things to moan about, I’ll just have to moan about things in my house instead. So - bacon. Why does a load of white flob always come out of it during cooking? It makes a right mess of the pan and isn’t very appetising. Something should be done. And don’t get me started on toilet roll (you don’t need to, I’m going to talk about it anyway)! I know lots of people are complaining they can’t get it, but spare a thought for people like me who spent the best part of a ...

Where’s the money? All we hear about these days is austerity, and that there is no money for public services; and how Brexit is going to bring us even more financial woes. Yet, the answer to all our financial problems is staring us in the face. In 2017, then Prime Minister Theresa May famously said that we don’t have “ a magic money tree that we can shake ”. Surely the solution is to get one of these trees! I think it is shocking that the leaders of our country would go on record to declare the existence of such a magical tree and yet make no effort to obtain one! This is Britain! We used to rule the world, and if we wanted something, we went and took it! Well, we want one of these magic money trees, so lets bally well go out and get one. I imagine they grow somewhere mystical, like Peru, or Stonehenge. Dave Sceptic Bispham Political correctness has gone mad I was quite dismayed to read that Blackpool Council are adapting a number of roads so that they are accessible to “...

To many, the Blackpool Tramway is a charming throwback to bygone days. Not only is it one of the world’s oldest electric tramways, it is the last surviving first-generation tramway in the UK. Nostalgia is one of Blackpool’s most lucrative commodities, with many visitors trying to revisit the holidays of their youth or recreate them for their own children so no wonder then that Blackpool Council want to expand the tramway beyond the promenade and have already begun extending the tracks through the town towards the railway station. But when accidents occur, as they did at the 2019 ‘ Ride The Lights ' event when a 14-year-old boy got stuck under a tram leaving him in a critical condition, it seems logical that we should pause and ask ourselves whether we should be moving backwards by expanding this Victorian method of transportation or moving forward with something much safer. At the hugely popular (and otherwise brilliant) ‘ Ride The Lights ’, Blackpool promenade is closed to cars fo...

Rough Justice We hear a lot about a lack of justice these days. I say make the punishment fit the crime. If you’ve stolen something, the public should be allowed to take their pick of your belongings; if you don’t pick up your dog’s poo then you should have dog poo pushed through your letterbox. Also, if you’ve lied on Twitter that the nitrogen used in fracking is completely safe because a percentage of our breathable air is nitrogen anyway then you should be forced to breathe only nitrogen and see how long you last. And have dog poo pushed through your letterbox. Oh and before you ask, yes, I am a regular contributor to Thornton Cleveleys Chat on Facebook. Tom Opinion Thornton McDonalds Yet Again Once More Now that the McDonalds in Cleveleys has finally been green-lit, the town can look forward to experiencing the Big Mac, Large Fries, Huge Belly and Massive Neck. Jilly Junter Cleveleys Cross about Norcross The work being done to Norcross roundabout to improve the traffic flow will...

McDonald's restaurants. That’s what they call themselves, but they don’t really fit the dictionary definition of a restaurant, do they? “A place where meals are prepared and served to customers ”, says the Cambridge Dictionary. Well, it’s questionable whether anything is prepared on the site. For a start, the fries arrive at the franchises pre-chipped, pre-coated in sodium acid pyrophosphate (to stop them greying, apparently), partially cooked and flash frozen. They get dumped in hot oil on the premises, but that's hardly “preparation”. Then there’s the question of “serving”. If getting your purchase handed to you on a plastic tray while you stand waiting at the counter before finding your own sticky table at which to consume your sodium-acid-pyrophosphate-coated (but deliciously golden-looking) fries, and then clearing away your own rubbish and tray counts as “service”, then I guess they are a restaurant. That’s also assuming you consider what they sell to be “food”. Love them...