Mrs Muggins Goes On a Mini Tour of Italy, While the Butcher and the Clown Meet in Alaska! by Alfred N.Muggins

16/8/25
Alfred was listening to a great playlist on You Tube, as was his frequent method of hearing music at the moment. His ears pricked up, after Iggy Pop and the Stranglers et al, they were followed by the Sex Pistols doing 'Pretty Vacant' and he became even more tuned in, pulse racing. He had been consuming Facebook memes at an even greater rate than usual half the morning , particularly following Trump and Putin's pantomime in Alaska yesterday (didn't they know there was a real war going on and civilians were still being killed, not to mention the poor sods on the frontlines?!) while he had a lie in and a slow get up. His wife had left him (no he didn't mean that. She had just gone on her third (mini!) holiday of the summer (he had been on one of them, a full week, just the previous week, but he wasn't jealous. She deserved a bit of time away from him, for a(nother) change, and because she hadn't fully seen the north of Italy yet and needed to go again to finish it off. She had not had time to go to Venice on the last whistle stop mini holiday there in May. Finally she would perhaps go on a gondola with her daughter, eat ice cream on the shores of Lake Garda, and escape perhaps from the clutches of Casanova, or the Italian waiters, he hoped. Alfred had told her that Casanova was long dead, and he would not be there, but it hadn't stopped her.
Anyway, having driven them to the money grabbing Manchester Airport on Thursday morning, two days before, and escaped with their car, and his bank card intact (this time!)(this time instead of them being fined for a payment for dropping off they had never had to pay before, and had not even known they had to pay, although they had suspected there might be some kind of charge now for merely dropping off people, your own family member , at an airport. (But no politician saw this as an impediment to trade or a prevention of modern Britain's smooth infrastructures. (Why when they lived in an age where deep channel tunnels were built to get people to Paris 10 minutes earlier, or even bridges, did they think that slowing people down with a head scratching monetary demand to pay someone over the internet cloud, when you were rushing to get people into the correct terminal of the airport on time, did anyone, and particularly anyone in government or politics, think that it was a good idea to slow people down in this way with extra headaches? (Alfred was even more grateful that he didn't have to go on this holiday as airports generally, and travel were becoming so much more complex.) Thankfully after letting his wife take his precious bank card out of the car to try to find out how to pay for this inconvenient charge she brought it safely back, revealing that the official couldn't of course, (sadly!) take cash, but it could be paid online. Mrs Muggins' efficient, and clued up, internet savvy daughter had now agreed to take the pressure off Alfred and she would pay the inconvenient fee online while they were in the airport (apparently £7 or something for dropping people off within five minutes! It didn't even include a porter to carry the bags!)(it was for their benefit anyway, not his, he wasn't even going on the holiday (although he would of course be with them in spirit!) Anyway Alfred was pleased that he could just drive back out without incurring any further headaches or charges for breathing oxygen in the air, or for polluting the air with his petrol, or for overstaying their slot (which he/they didn't). (God forbid anyone ever broke down at the drop off bays, he couldn't imagine how much money the moneymakers would make out of such a disaster.) He could put it behind him, except for making a mental note (and now a written one!) that this was just one extra, rather small, but nonetheless important reason for having a further revolution in Britain soon.
At least he got away from Manchester for once without it raining. He had been left, holding the dogs, so to speak, looking after their dog and their new cat, and Mrs Muggins' daughter's dog. The two dogs had done the trip to Manchester airport with him, for company and to occupy them before he had to go to work later in the day. He gave them a short walk at the toilet stop on the beautiful Woodhead Pass, in the nice warm weather, which was actually something of a heatwave, across Europe, and particularly in Spain and Portugal, where many forest fires had broken out. The dams here at the Woodhead Pass were very low, as there had been very little rain since the spring started (despite their proximity to Manchester!)
Anyway, this morning (two days later) the dogs started barking once he felt obliged to go downstairs to feed the new cat and the dogs. As soon as he let them out in the garden he   realised his mistake. The neighbours above had returned only yesterday after a long sojourn at the Lincolnshire coast, and now their daughter had reappeared with her dog, to help out with a few garden chores etc. This poor, and perfectly nice dog had long been considered by Alfred and his wife's dog to be his greatest rival and enemy, so it set him off in the usual race to the fence, or when indoors to every room where noises from next door could be heard through the window. Of course the usual barking was doubled by having Mrs Muggins' daughter's dog in residence also who ganged up in support of their dog to increase the volume and quantity of barking.
So there was going to be little peace and quiet for a hopeful writer this morning , even when he could wake up sufficiently from the barrage of fascinating but disturbing Facebook memes and video/reels and You Tube videos to do with starvation and decimation in Gaza, unremitting unopposed ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and rocket attacks upon Ukrainian civilians in their apartments. The face of Donald Trump, his latest nemesis, the Clown, was everywhere, and even his self excusing, hate filled smug dismissive voice this morning as he desperately tried to gain credit for ending a war which he had merely fuelled by bringing the erstwhile Butcher of the Ukrainian battlefields, Bloodsucker Vladimir Putinpot, back in from the cold, even though he had done absolutely nothing to deserve western appreciation. It occurred to Alfred, from his perverse perspective, that these two international reprobates, America's Clown President, raiding the coffers of an erstwhile superpower and misspending so much of its precious taxpayers' funds, and the Butcher of St. Petersburg, obsessed with recreating the old Soviet and Imperial Russian Empire at the expense of so many precious lives, were actually both Pretty Vacant!