Reasons to be Cheerful ..

Ian Dury should be compulsory for all those suffering the Brexit Blues.

Today very briefly, I offer you Farage achieving top place in the pre-EP opinion polling (which as a loyal Conservative I should deprecate cough cough) and Boris achieving top place in an Express leadership opinion poll. Add to this the spectacle of the self-loving little Sadiq Khan making an utter arse of himself in London trying to get down wiv der yoof (actually most of them went to £45k a year public schools and live in Surrey with Mummy) who in turn are pretending to get down wiv der Man.

Enough to make one smile.

Parliaments we have known

British Parliamentary sittings have, over the years, been characterised as individual and distinct epochae taking their character from the sum of their members; we have

The Short Parliament
1640,  Sat for only three weeks

The Long Parliament
1640 - 1660 England was much engaged during this time with other matters

The Rump Parliament
1648 - To convene a court to lop off the King's noggin

The Rotten Parliament
2009, The Brown ministry, when MPs were found out in theft, fraud, peculation, lying and gross misuse of public funds. Everything from moat cleaning, duck houses, crystal grapefruit bowls, Bang and Olafson hi-fis was charged to the poor taxpayer, but only three of the hundreds of crooks ended up in prison

The Quite Short Parliament
Parliament sitting under the gaze of the diminutive Speaker Bercow, whose little legs swing boyishly from the Speaker's Chair without an elevated footstool. Like many small men, he compensates for lack of size with an outsized ego and profusion of self-love

The Anal Parliament
Going beyond the Rump, the 2017/19 Parliament is entirely up its own arse, incapable of representing the people by whom it was elected but unwilling to surrender power and privilege by facing those electors in the polls.

With the Maybe Parliamentary session that started in June 2017 now coming up to two years without a State Opening, the tourist industry, robe-making and carriage-wheeling industries are suffering and the sovereign must surely be wondering whether she'll manage another one in her reign.

One Parliament however that has been entirely unknown to British democracy since Edgar summoned his first Moot over a thousand years ago is the Honest Parliament.

Plus ca change ...

Some things never change; from the Telegraph

In 1938 John Reith, Director- General of the BBC, asked the German foreign minister to tell Hitler that the BBC was “not anti-Nazi”, adding that if his German opposite number were to visit, he would fly the swastika from Broadcasting House. Even after war was declared, the BBC decided not to allow Sir Horace Rumbold, a former ambassador to Berlin, to broadcast on Germany because he was “too anti‑Nazi”.

They've just replaced their love for the Nazis with love for the EU. 

Duff Cooper, who resigned from the Cabinet after Munich, told friends that if Chamberlain had “come back from Munich saying ‘peace with terrible, unmitigated, unparallelled dishonour’, perhaps I would have stayed. But peace with honour!” Harold Macmillan burnt Chamberlain in effigy on Guy Fawkes Night in 1938.

Theresa May, the deluded Chamberlain of our own age, has the same utterly misplaced faith in her own scrap of paper. She, too, I suspect will decorate many a Guy Fawkes Night bonfire in the autumn.

Karfreitag

A cautionary tale.

For as long as anyone can remember, Good Friday or Karfreitag has always been the same. Easter is a big deal here - after the chill snows and dark valleys of Winter, Spring bursts out with a fecundity unknown in Britain; nature is like a teenager pumped with hormones and just explodes into life. Spring flowers push through the last of the snow, and the first of the year's butterflies spread jewelled wings over still-brown herbage.

For Catholics here in the alpine Land, the deal is work until late lunchtime and then home early for the weekend. Protestants, for reasons I can't quite fathom, have always had the whole of Good Friday as a holiday, by custom going back to the 17th century. Paid. Like a Feiertag. Not taken from their annual leave.

Until of course some idiot claimed the arrangement was unlawful and discriminatory and started a legal action. Now the state government has introduced a new law - everyone gets a half-day on Good Friday. Work ends at 14.00.

Of course, both Catholics and Protestants are up in arms. Protestants have lost half a day's holiday, and Catholics used to slink-off home at 2pm anyway so have gained nothing.

The politicians responsible have called it "einen guten, tragfähigen Kompromiss" - a good, sustainable compromise. Everyone else has predicted it won't last the week.

The Remain Party

The seven  - or possibly now eight - MPs sitting for what, to be honest, we must call the Remain Party, despite having been preparing since last month with company registrations and so forth, were singularly unprepared yesterday for the questions of the press. Chukka on 'Today' was classic. "Do you have any policies other than Remain?" "Brexit is a really important issue and we're committed to rescuing Britain from this foolishness" it went, sort of.

So no. The only policy they have is Remain.

I wish them success in attracting a further 29 rebel MPs from both sides of the House, so they may assume from the SNP the privileges of a third party, together with more Short money and a better quality offices. I also look forward to February 2022 and PMQs

"Mr Ummummumma!"

"Will the Prime Minister recognise that the only way out of this Brexit debacle is to allow a further Referendum, to keep us in Europe where we belong"

"I thank the honourable member for Streatham. He will be aware that since we left the EU in 2019, slashing taxes and opening trade borders, our economy has boomed, defying the global downturn and the car crash of the Eurozone. Foreign Direct Investment is at its highest ever, we have the fourth greatest global GDP, the pound buys €2.20 for our holidaymakers who will again flood Europe this Summer. The Trussel Trust has opened its two-thousandth foodbank in the EU and the incredible generosity of the British people in sending their spare packets and tins across the Channel is keeping many poor Europeans afloat. We fully support IMF aid to the Eurozone, and will do all we can to help the nations of Europe to recover democracy and to stand on their feet again. The government however has no plans to join them"

CUTTER!

On board HM Cutter Vexatious somewhere in the Med ..

The tannoy crackles into life

"Now hear this! We have been ordered back to the UK to patrol Channel waters to intercept up a new wave of migrants crossing from France. We will make cautious passage via a number of ports, combining our passage home with a number of courtesy visits. Number 4 working rig under way with Whites in port until Gib. That's all."

In the wheelhouse the 1st Lt shifted against the chart table. "How long do you think we can string it out, sir?"

"Our orders say 'dawdle'. So I reckon we can take six weeks or so. Maybe develop an engine fault - that could give us another four weeks if needed. The last thing they want is us working the box in the Channel and actually picking up migrants"

"But I don't understand why we've been ordered home, sir? We were doing perfectly well not picking up migrants from Libya, so why go back home to not pick up migrants from France?"

"Politics, Futtock, politics. We have to be there to prove that the government is compassionate and humanitarian, but without actually rescuing anyone who would embarrass the Home Secretary. He's still reeling from putting that twelve year old with a full henna beard and three wives into Knob Hill Secondary. And right now not rescuing Channel migrants has greater priority than not rescuing African migrants"

"Some of the lads were talking about the old days, when they used to board yachts looking for hooky fags and baccy, sir. Or maybe catching some Rupert with a K of skunk. Now they say it's just lying in port with a maintenance watch and sunbathing"

"What's wrong with that? You've never been stuck in a frozen muddy creek near Hull, Futtock, waiting for a non-existent landing of Superkings and missing the final of X-factor. Thank God we had those TV satellite domes fitted before we sailed"

"Oh. And do get back into men's clothes before we reach the Western Approaches, Number One. Those sarong wraps really won't do for Pompey."

HMC Seeker - ordered home 31/12/18, as at 0700hrs GMT 13/2/19 berthed at Gibraltar

Designer primrose vests and obscene imprecations

There is a new suggestion going the rounds from the Remainers - that they should stage a Remainer 'General Strike' in the event of Brexit happening. The chaos, of course, would be appalling.

Schools and universities would be short-staffed as teachers would leave their posts to enjoy a strike day, some in London no doubt headed to Borough Market for a day of browsing and grazing. But Borough Market, like much of Hoxton and Spitalfields, would have come to a halt. The artisanal yoghurt-makers would be striking, as would the sour-dough bakers and vegan-rennet Islington cheese-makers. The Feng Shui carrot stall would be deserted, the hipster porridge and Quinoa bars empty and dark, and the cute bistrot start-up using roofer's nailbags as plates forlorn.

In Farringdon, Exeter Market would be empty. The app design studios, the organic health workshop in which Guardian hacks have their feet nibbled by fish to the sounds of whalesong, the myriad colour consultancies and the interior design practices they serve all dark. Only St John, the coarse eaterie feeding ruddy Leavers with offal, would remain open.

Across London traffic would flow freely as TfL's traffic consultants took a strike day. Black cabs would enjoy a near monopoly - Remainers preferring Uber - with drivers explaining the perils of Qualified Majority Voting to imprisoned fares. The trains would be blissfully empty, and best of all the streets clear and safe from the swarms of lycra louts on their £3k death machines.

The BBC would broadcast Ealing comedies and 1950s war films non-stop as eight out of ten staff would not have turned up. James O'Brien (Ampleforth, LSE) would be lunching with David Dimbleby (Charterhouse, Oxford, Bullingdon Club) and Adam Boulton (Westminster, Christ Church, Oxford) at Le Gavroche whilst assistants covered their shows.

And outside Parliament, a score of Remainers in plastic vests specially designed in pastel and primrose shades by Stella McCartney would howl vile and obscene imprecations at SPADs and researchers they mistook for MPs.

What's not to like?

UFOs, scared Septics and Anglo-Saxon ghosts

I had intended to post about rebalancing political power this morning. No longer. It's not often that a story in which one was personally involved drops into one's lap, but today we have one. A story in the Telegraph  has just explained for the first time an old event about which I have been feeling a little guilty for many years.

First my tale. It was 1980. We were a small group of lads in our early 20s from southern Suffolk, scattered around Ipswich but meeting frequently to carouse and take fun. One Saturday we decided to make a lunchtime session at the Queen's Head in Erwarton, a cosy waterside pub in a small village looking southwards out over the mouth of the Stour into darkest Essex. A friend of a friend had just taken the lease, and we were trying our chance at discounted beer.

In the bar we quickly made friends with a young American Air Force Lieutenant, who like many from the nearby USAF cold-war squadrons was living off-base in a rented cottage and had immersed himself in English village life. The pub was now his local - and he loved it, and his status there, with his own pewter beer jug and folk that knew his name.

Of course we knew the USAF bases well. We would talk our way in usually claiming to be brothers-in-law to Airmen married to Brit women. They were like small bits of the Midwest transported by tornado into ancient East Anglia, with black and white Dodge police prowlers on the gates and cops with pistols on their hips. They had Main Street shops and outlets, and importantly a PX and American bars. The PX provided pints of vodka (bought by a compliant serviceman with ID) at a fraction of their UK price, and the bar provided a truly authentic American drinking experience. One needed dollars for everything, of course - and all of us carried them.

I was also at that age, not far from my pubescent Airfix model days, something of an expert in US aviation kit, as only the sponge-minded young are. I could not only identify an approaching low flying aircraft as a F4 rather than an A10 or rarely then as a Lightning from engine noise alone but could tell you which models of F4 were stationed at each base in Suffolk, their range, weapons payloads and more.

We were keen, as the young and foolish are, to let the young Loot know we were chums and that we knew all about his world and we thought it cool. The young Loot, for reasons I had not fully understood until this morning, felt obliged to report to his CO on the Monday following an encounter with some young Brits who knew a helluva lot about their base and aircraft. The result we heard from our mate's landlord mate a week later; the base security people had thrown him into jail and subjected him to three days of  'enhanced interrogation' by teams who had flown in from the States, extracting from his tortured mind every single word exchanged in the Queen's Head.

We weren't that worried. We hadn't done anything wrong and we believed ourselves untouchable. We put the experience down to many Septics being arseholes (let me tell you another time about being chased around the Three Tuns by an obese puce-faced Tech Master-Sergeant for tearing up a dollar bill into a bar ashtray ...). However, the Loot was a nice young man, albeit a silly one for reporting our encounter, and I've always held myself a bit responsible for his three days under torture / interrogation back in 1980.

Now of course it's clear that his action and their reaction was around the time of the SAS fooling the poor Septics with fake UFOs in Rendlesham Forest. Made believable by long local tradition of the ghosts of the ancient Anglo-Saxon court of King Raedwald haunting the plantations, the king whose 'palace' (read big hut) was located in that place. 

Thirty-eight years on, it's good to know it wasn't really my fault.

Have a very happy New Year's eve all and drink a dram for me. And one for the Loot.

Five things we owe to the EU, they say ...

After reading the blurb for the new multi-million House of European History in Brussels, a building that pays homage to the architectural genius of Albert Speer, here are five little known facts about European history. They must be true because Antonio Tajani, one of the EU's several unelected Presidents, said so in public last week:-

1. Conflict
The EU not only defeated the Nazis, but it was the Common Agricultural Policy that crushed the Soviet Empire in the Cold War, leading to the lifting of the iron curtain in 1989 and the freedom of the enslaved serfs of Eastern Europe. The EU has kept the peace in Europe since 1945 and no wars or conflicts have ever happened since. 

2. Information Technology
Since the EU invented the Internet in the 1990s, computer technology has transformed the world. The EU leads the globe in rolling out new phones and tablet computers and our browser Euview and operating system Eudoze lead the world in quality and function. Our search engine Archimedes has superior functionality to any other. 

3. Art and Culture
The EU are global leaders in popular music, culminating each year with the Eurovision song contest, which attracts viewers and many homosexuals from around the world. The contest sets the gold standard for modern popular music - much of which can be heard on the trams of Porto or Budapest played by young people on their Euphones!

4. Education
The EU is home to the world's highest-rated German, French and Hungarian language universities - ranking number one for both German speaking and French speaking institutions, and the EU rates number two in the world for Hungarian speaking higher education institutions.

5. Sport
During the 2016 Olympics, the EU28 took more gold, silver and bronze medals than any other competitor - beating the US, Russia and China. This demonstrates the sporting excellence in the Union that produces world class sportsmen and sportswomen. 

Although the EU is proud to disseminate this information to EU children through the Euro Museum's learning packs, my old friend the Major has some minor quibbles with the claims - which he noted as

Conflict - Since 1945 the EU has defended bugger all and has actually fomented war in the Balkans and Ukraine
IT - The EU lags both the UK and US, and now China in computer development, with not a single world class product or application achieved 
Culture - The EU ranks abysmally low in pop music and culture; their last star, Johnny Hallyday, has just died of old age
Education - The EU 27 don't have one single university in the global top 20 - the UK has 4
Sport - The EU can only claim a decent medal haul by including the UK, which alone reached 2nd place in the 2016 medals table

Back to the Future

"Thanks Gloria. And two digestives this afternoon, eh? It being Friday?"

"Tea's just mashing, Mr Scroggins. Shall I bring cups for the assembly line shop stewards?"

"No, No. We'll be here all day. And porcelain upsets them. Show them in". As he looked out of his  steel Crittal windows over the vast Leyland car plant, George Scroggins' heart surged with pride, pride at the haze from the leaking steam pipes, the cracked and patched asbestos cement roofs, the grimy and cracked windows and the plywood-patched skylights. From this plant came the finest automobile in Britain - the Austin-Morris Allegra. The noise of  the broken door closer woke him from his reverie.

"Come in! Come in! Arthur, Frank. Sit thee down.  Now I don't expect this to be a lengthy meeting ..."

"That's why you always see us at three-fifteen on Fridays, Mr Scroggins. To be fair."

"That's not wholly true, Frank, no, no .... now this is about young Donald Higginbottom I gather?"  

"Foreman suspended him, yes. Unwarranted victimisation. We're demanding full restitution."

"But Arthur, he was fixing gearbox gaiters with two inch nails. He ruined nearly two hundred cars before Quality Control noticed, half of which have already been sold."

"Not his fault, Mr Scroggins. Supply shop ran out of that size of machine screws, and the screw shop said they weren't scheduled to turn any more until November. Donald was on gaiter bonus for twenty gaiters a day - not fixing gaiters would have taken food from his childrens' mouths. So he used what he had. You can't blame the lad"

"Arthur, I have to support my foremen. I have to uphold the suspension."

"We'll bring Number Two Line, the rubber shop, the window shop and the carpet-cutters out unless he's revoked. Higginbottoms are big in the eastern sheds."

"Wait wait Frank. There's no need to be precipitous. Digestive biscuit? We've had two strikes already this month, if you recall. Now what if I say he's only provisionally suspended, permitted to work as normal until his hearing, on full pay, but nominally suspended?"

"On full bonus? Even if screw shop can't supply gaiter screws?"

"Yes yes. Alright? We'll ask the Welsh Megra plant if they can lend us some screws. Otherwise we'll go with the two-inch nails. Now about next month's cars. What have we got?"

"There's plenty of bright red upholstery vinyl, so we can switch all production to that. On the paint side, there's four thousand gallons of that yellowy-brown - 'Curry' the paint shop named it."

"Head office vetoed 'Curry' as an Allegra colour, Frank. It's not the best word, is it? Reminds me of that German mustard we had at BMW last year ... I know! Let's rename it the German for mustard - Gloria! What's German for mustard?"

"Moutarde, I think, Mr Scroggins"

"That's it. Tell the dealers they'll all be getting Moutarde Allegras with pillar-box red upholstery next month, Gloria. Now, lads, was there anything else?"

"There was a suggestion that in future customers might be able to choose their own body and seat colours, Mr Scroggins. And that the waiting lists might be cut from four months to ten days"

"Bloody scaremongering. Don't pay any heed to that rubbish, Frank. I promise you, under Mr Corbyn, such things will never happen!"      

Happy Jewish New Year - Rosh Hashanah!

Howard Jacobson in the Jewish Chronicle eviscerates Corbyn. Worth a New Year dram or two and a toast to our Judaic citizens.

"We know what an antisemite look like. He wears jackboots, a Swastika arm-band, and shouts Juden Raus; Jeremy Corbyn wears a British Home Stores vest under his shirt and is softly spoken.  Antisemites accuse Jews of killing Jesus; Corbyn is an atheist and seems not to mind if we did or didn't. Whether that's because Jesus was Jewish and killing him meant one less Jew in the world, is not for me to say.  And - and - he doesn't deny the Holocaust..."

Interlude

No Brexit today - I just can't do it. 

Off to Spain, then. I can just remember fascist Spain under Franco in the early 1970s - desperate poverty, asses carrying goods rather than the Commer vans that we had, wrinkled grannies in black doing dreadful things to children, fear and religious superstition, the secret police, and Franco's victims uneasy in their hidden graves. We had 10cc, Suzi Quattro and Genesis. They had torture. It was a third-world fascist shithole. Growing-up seeing the depths of degradation that far-right zealotry could bring to a European people, Spain left me with a lifelong hatred of fascism, far right authoritarianism, the racial purity nutters, the National Front (in those days) and anyone who wanted to control what I did with my own willie. I cheered when Franco died.

Years later, in the Easyjet age,  I saw the forensic tents over pieces of undeveloped scrubland beyond the city boundaries, exhuming the victims of Franco's death squads before the pile-drivers moved in to buid new apartments or industrial sheds. The sight moved me beyond words, and cemented my loathing of fascism.

Now Franco's raddled corpse itself is to be removed from Valle de los Caídos, a vast egoistic memorial to Franco and the unknown rapist. Well, good. Except, as politico-eu reports, the fascists are still with us, protesting at the desecration of their saint. At least it seems that the lady-fascists shave their pits these days, or perhaps the boy-fascist to her right is hiding her pit-hair under his nose?  Hey ho.

United Nations Human Rights Council - The 2018 awards

Good day! I am Dr Barrister Adoke Aboyongo and I am please to announce UNHRC awards for 2018. The Council has seven first world members (not eligible for prizes due to colonial advantages) and forty members drawn from the minor kleptocracies, dictatorships, banana republics, junta, repressive autocracies or theocracies and corrupt and failed states from around the world. This year those forty nations competed for our top prizes and I am happy to announce the winners. 

THE LAVRENTI BERIA AWARD FOR EXTRAJUDICIAL MURDER
The judges were unanimous in deciding this award should go to PRESIDENT DUTERTE of the Phillipines for having shot more citizens in twelve months than any other dictator of the past 60 years. The professionalism and commitment of Mr Duterte's death squads, working overnight and weekends, have left a mountain of corpses and a lake of blood on Manila's streets. 

GILLETTE PRIZE FOR EXCELLENCE IN PUBLIC EXECUTIONS 
For the 11th year running this prize has gone to the KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA, a nation foremost in skills of head-chopping and spectacular and bloody public executions. A special mention of the nation's high regard for gender equality was underlined by the panel - in 2017 some 27% of heads chopped were women's, the highest proportion ever of women executed in the Kingdom.

MONSANTO GOLD MEDAL FOR AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
The winner of the 2018 award is SOUTH AFRICA. The rape, murder, mutilation and dismemberment of white farmers under Operation Machete has achieved remarkable levels of terror, fear and lawlessness, and the police and government are congratulated for refraining from intervening in any way with the movement. At the same time, the activists have achieved a 14% reduction in domestic food production and cash-crop harvests - a spectacular reduction for the 21st century.

THE POL POT PRIZE FOR POPULATION DEGRADATION
The judges were faced with a strong field of candidates and shortlisting was a difficult process. Finally, the decision was unanimous to award the prize to VENEZUELA; the sheer levels of incompetence required to turn an oil-rich second world nation into an impoverished failed state with a starving population forced to kill and eat their pet cats and dogs could not be equalled. 

With deep thanks to all the nations of the 40 who were not successful this year, and to the many of you who made kind contributions to the Aboyongo Fund for Comfortable Retirements ($ only, please!).

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Yes, all the above nations really are members of the UN Human Rights Council.

From the Desk of Dr Barrister Adoke Aboyongo

FROM THE DESK OF DR BARRISTER ADOKE ABOYONGO 

Dear Friend,

GDPR Regulations

Important changes are coming into effect today that govern the way in which we here communicate with you.

To remind you, I am the only child of the Late Chief and Mrs Abingo Aboyongo, a very wealthy stick merchant based in Lagos. The fish-scorpion bite that caused my father's death was, I believe, deliberately administered by a business rival. As he died in prolonged agony, his limbs turning emerald green in a side effect of the deadly venom, he whispered to me that he had secreted forty five million dollars ($45,000,000) in a secret UK bank account, the profits of European stick exports. The tragic death of my mother in a concrete pump accident shortly after means I remain sole heir to this fortune.

Sadly, restrictive Nigerian currency import regulations mean that I am unable to withdraw my fortune in person. I therefore wrote to you last year asking for your help in securing withdrawal of cleared funds in return for a 30% share of the capital balance. You were kind enough to provide me then with your bank details, pin, password, memorable word, mother's maiden name and first pet name (Dingo - really?) at that time, shortly before you so tragically lost so much money from your accounts due to the negligence and incompetence of the banks.

If you wish to continue to receive these 419 emails, please click on the link below. This will take you to a website which will install a small and unobtrusive piece of software on your computer. In return you will share in a ONE THIRD part of my unclaimed wealth to spend as you wish, on marsupials or other pet species of your choice, or to replenish your much diminished bank accounts. 

Yours most sincerely


Dr Barrister Adoke Aboyongo PhD MA BA(Hons) LLB
(Desk of)

If your teen kids are night owls, avoid Austria

Brits may be horrified, but Austria's nine state governments have for many years been able to regulate a host of social behaviour matters from car washing and noise to teen curfews. In particular, it was this last area that locals felt was most overdue for reform; 'county lines' differences allowed teens to cross from an early bedtime state to a party state to carry-on the night. 

It reminds me of formative drinking years in Ipswich, where all pubs would close at 10.30pm without exception. On Wherstead Road, however, just outside the borough boundary, stood the 'Ostrich' - subject to Suffolk hours, and open until 11.00pm. I think they used to sell more beer in the last half hour of the day then they did all evening beforehand.

Anyway, the Austrian states have just agreed a common teen curfew. Under 14s must be safely indoors by 11.00pm, whilst 14 - 16 year olds can stay out until 1.00am. The curfews apply to tourists' kids as well as natives - and if breached can cost parents a hefty fine. Wine and beer are pretty unrestricted, but spirits can only be bought by over 18s. And from next year an unheard-of restriction bans under 18s from buying cigarettes. In one of Europe's most heavily smoking nations, it's a big move. Still, kids can still get their nicotine fix at home - the idea of 'passive smoking' simply hasn't taken root here. 

Tees for the 'Patriotic nativist Identitarian movement'

Not my style, but readers may be interested in a line of clothing and accessories from Phalanx Europa aimed at the 'patriotic nativist Identitarian movement' which the uninformed and unhip incorrectly still call the Euro right wing. 

It looks quite cool and well designed, if not my own old-fashioned style (I wear nothing bearing writing or other people's names) and not at all skinhead nazi - more, erm, cappuccino Identitarian. And that's the problem with niche fashion stuff; I predict that before the Summer is out, cheap Chinese knock-offs of some of these lines will appear on market stalls across Europe, neither the makers nor the vendors having a clue as to the meaning or symbolism or the words. 

And on the streets of Southall or Spitalfields the local yoof, never bright at the best of times, might think the Lambda symbol quite a cool thing to have on a tee ... 

Perils of written German

Today I am trying to row-back on a business letter I sent yesterday. 

I intended to type "Sehr geehrte Herren" - Dear Sirs. What I actually sent them was "Sehr geehtrer Herren" - Very Horny Gentlemen.

It's genuinely excuciatingly embarrassing. They have absolutely no sense of humour. 

Oh well. 

Decolonising Academia

TO ALL STUDENTS

Please see the important communication below sent today by the Vice-Chancellor from an important academic conference in Val d'Isère


Sam Duggs
Faculty Administrator 

The faculty of Steeple Bumstead University have considered the many representations made by our BAME, LGBTQQIP2SAA and Identity Fluid students on the matter of decolonising our various undergraduate degree courses. We accept that our teaching, based on the canons of western thought, the First and Second Enlightenment, a Judaeo-Christian historical framework and a Eurocentric cultural bias, will disadvantage many students for whom these components are not endogenous. We have therefore made the following changes:-

- A new Chair, the Hegelian Professor of Rap, has been created and we are looking across the Atlantic for suitable candidates. Tunky Dog's Ass, JXee and Nickel Cap Head have unfortunately been appointed to academic posts with tenure at Harvard, Yale and MIT respectively, so will not be available.

- The University library has been decommissioned and converted to a multi-faith Mosque in which adherents of all faiths may worship as long as they accept Islamic restrictions on their beliefs. To promote Wimmin's Rights, we have secured separate facilities for female undergraduates to keep them apart from the men. Wimmin are also encouraged to wear the veil on campus to prevent inherent and unconscious academic bias that may occur if their faces were visible and they could be individually identified.

- We are introducing a number of new texts written in English. These include  "Busted! My crack whore years" by Snaggs Turdish (123pp, large text version with illustrations) "My poetry doesn't rhyme or scan" by Inca Pointless (both sides of the A4 sheet) and "Bollocks to God" by the Bishop of Woolwich (Gay Rainbow press, 422pp, 4to).

- However, the boldest change we're making is in changing the university's use of the English language in all teaching, seminars and tutorials. English is the very symbol of a colonialist mindset, and just hearing the language used triggers many of our more sensitive students. From next term, the University will use exclusively Khoe, the most prevalent of the Khoisan click languages used in Africa, for all lectures, seminars and tutorials, and for all written assignments. With a total vocabulary of barely a thousand words, we expect this to make any writing that students are required to do much simpler. However, as it will take rather longer to explain difficult concepts, it also means cutting large parts of course content to fit the available vocabulary. We will use the Isolate syntax (|gáro = ostrich, !nábe = giraffe, kx'âa = to drink). 

Academic staff will attend crash Khoisan courses over the holiday and students are recommended to purchase the Khoe primer for the discounted price of £89.99 from the University bookshop.

I myself am attending an important academic conference in the Maldives for much of next term but will return to see the final stages of the conversion of the old earl of Bumstead's seat at Palladian Hall into the Vice Chancellor's new residence. I wish you all the very best at this exciting time of change - and  ts'ókwàna ɦatʃ'pitʃ'i as they say in Mogadishu!

Tarquin Bevan
Vice Chancellor

Eight things to do with a whiteboard ......

The further I get from all the corporate crap, only some of which I pretended to understand in the wind-down year before I took the early bath, the more I wonder why there are people who still take it all so seriously. The risible idiocies coming through my professional body have now surely degenerated into self-parody; surely to God, no-one believes this to be serious?

What next? "Using snazzy sounds and transitions in Powerpoint to give evidence at the Construction Court - how to impress!"

I recall I once shared a complex but very plain spreadsheet with a director who gazed at it unmoved. The following week I resubmitted it to his PA with all the cells coloured in and a 48pt header 'Risk Management Dashboard'. He loved it. After that I found that calling anything a 'dashboard' was an instant way of engaging his attention, until 'agile' came along - when everything had to be 'agile'. Well, I was bloody agile at that point. By about a thousand miles.

With apologies to Sunderland ...

I was looking back on posts made here about ten years ago, to see what I had written about the great crash. The astonishing thing is that the blog has been going for this long - 4,560 posts, 3m pageviews, 30,000 comments. Anyway, I'm not sure I said much about the great crash except to savagely excoriate Gordon Brown, but I found the following. It made me chuckle, so perhaps worth another outing:-

10/08/08
Many of you will be familiar with the London conference hotels that cluster in the hinterland between the Euston Road and Oxford Street; bland, anonymous 80s-ish foyers, conference rooms equipped with audio and projectors for the ubiquitous Powerpoint presentations, and kitchens equipped to dish out a 20 minute lunch. I would usually rather have a fork thrust in my eyeballs than spend a day in one of these places, but a couple of years ago, despite every ingenious effort on my part to escape, I was obliged to do so. These things are perennially popular with Northern middle managers for some reason; pompous, inflated little balloons of men who fiddle incessantly with their testicles and whose requests to ".. bring us a black coffee, will you, pet" to the Lithuanian staff are met with incomprehension.

Anyway, on this day the conference kitchens had excelled themselves. The buffet lunch was a massive stainless steel bed of crushed ice on which were laid salver after salver of living and dead water-creatures; oysters, green-lipped mussels, sea urchins, sushi and sashimi, several varieties of Nethrops, a poached salmon, nestling in beds of crisp lettuce from which the fluorescent glow of lemons shone as artistic highlights. In the queue before me a knot of Northern balloons worked their fingers frantically in their trouser pockets. "I can't eat that; it's bloody raw fish" "Lewk, George, there's some crabsticks there" "Where?" "There, in the corner by those slimy things" "Have you got any bread, love?".

If you visit the pages of the Sunderland Echo to gauge the reaction of that place to the news that Policy Exchange thinks we should stop spending our tax subsidies here, you will be presented with a recruitment video for the local Barclays call centre. A call centre worker steps from a limo of the kind favoured by suburban hen-parties to the corporate HQ; the camera pans lovingly around the corporate gym and the cafeteria, the chilled shelves of which will be reassuringly devoid of raw fish, and the shot closes with the monstrous sign over the corporate front door that reads "Through these doors walk the loveliest people in Sunderland. And you're one of them". You just know that as the head-balloon stood inspecting the newly-erected sign and counting his testicles that he longed to add a comma and 'pet' to the final sentence.

I suspect that Barclays confines its Northern middle-managers to their own call centres and an occasional two days at a London conference hotel. If these little bundles of wool-polyester pomposity were ever allowed into the bank's docklands tower to meet the teenagers with iPod earphones slung around their necks and take-away sushi boxes littering their desks who earn six times their own salary, it would have the same effect as a drunk with a cigarette at a children's balloon party. Scraps of wool-polyester and bits of limp testicle would lie scattered from Bow to ExCel.

And the adage that you can take the man out of Sunderland but you can't take Sunderland out of the man holds true. It would be cruel and unusual punishment indeed to take these fish from their small ponds to resettle them. The piece in the Sunderland Echo uncannily parrots the Onion in quoting "We have the Winter Gardens, the Glass Centre, the Aquatic Centre, the football team – and the only way is up". Alright, pet.