Reading Time: 8 minutes Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. – Margaret Atwood The last time I said anything remotely qualified as sexist, was in 1980, in a Chinese restaurant in the West-End of London. The chopsticks were hygienically wrapped in a beautiful red paper sleeve, decorated with Chinese […]
I Won’t Cry For You, Sally Jones
Reading Time: 4 minutes The death of UK-born Isis recruiter, Sally Jones, may be considered regrettable for one reason only. Had she been captured, she may have given us valuable information concerning the methods used in the recruitment of terrorists. Under the circumstances, though, her death could not have been avoided. So far as her son is concerned, one […]
Brexit Musings (6) – Anyone For Tennis?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Game, set, and match First off, a dose of double-dutch. Incredibly enough, the Dutch have actually got a government, after how many days? 208 to be precise. And the Dutch economy was doing so well without one. Now, we have a four-party coalition ready to screw things up. That’s politics for you. The UK government’s […]
Facebook Is No Longer Michel Foucault’s “Heterotopia”
Reading Time: 6 minutes The Missing Comma It started with the sharing of a tweet in a Facebook group. There followed a heated discussion between those, like myself, who thought that the tweet had more than an undertone of racial prejudice and white supremacy, and those who didn’t. I don’t recall that the person who posted […]
Brexit Musings (5) – Brexit In America And “Eggs Florentine”
Reading Time: 4 minutes I read an interesting piece in the Mail On Sunday, the other day. And there was I, thinking that the Mail On Sunday, like the Daily Mail, was as far anti-EU as you could get, until an erroneous comment of mine, posted on Facebook, got corrected by someone who’s more familiar with the antics of the […]
Utopia, Anno 2017 – Catalonia And Brexit
Reading Time: 8 minutes During the UK referendum campaign, the Leave camp’s arguments for leaving the European Union focused on, (i) a full economic recovery only made possible outside the EU, (ii) close to zero immigration and, (iii) a financed healthcare system. Whilst a non negligible proportion of the Brexit voters are clearly isolationist and/or xenophobic, I do […]
Pardon Me, Your Honour – I’m a Sexy Lady With Talent
Reading Time: 5 minutes In May this year, Lavinia Woodward, an Oxford medical student, was found guilty of stabbing, and seriously injuring, her boyfriend. An exceptional delay in the verdict was pronounced, the court having heard of her ‘extraordinary talent’, as sufficient reason for this strange decision. The judge had made it clear that he did not favour a […]
Mayhem in Florence
Reading Time: 5 minutes In the beginning, there was Rome – six paths leading away from the city, towards an ever closer union of six warring nations. Then, there was Maastricht, the symbol of a European treaty that no-one voted for. More recently, Lisbon, emblem of the same treaty that no-one got a chance to vote for. Now, there […]
(M)Alice In Euroland – Juncker’s Playing With The F-Word
Reading Time: 7 minutes Juncker through the looking-glass There are many words beginning with the letter “F” that are not suitable for the ears of small children. The word, alluded to, but not pronounced by Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European commission, certainly falls into this category. I feel great passion for the European Union, but the annual […]
Joking Apart – Don’t Turn Charlie Hebdo Into Charlie Hebdon’t
Reading Time: 8 minutes The Kouachi brothers ran into the street shouting “Charlie is dead”…Today’s Charlie-killers are loose on the Net and in the White House…But Charlie is alive and well. Well Donald, who do YOU remind ME of? WARNING In the same vein as Charlie Hebdo, this post is provocative and can endanger your mental health. This […]