I was just hours away from catching a flight to Sydney en route to London, when Her Indoors rang in a blind panic from France asking me to bring a blouse and skirt to France. Hers not mine. While she was on the phone I vainly searched through her cupboard. After many minutes on Facetime we tracked down the miscreant items. Unfortunately it made me 1kg over my baggage allowance and the only way round this was to wear them on the plane. The skirt is stretched and the blouse is split but at least I made quick friends with the Qantas flight stewards.
On the flight to Sydney I was upgraded to business class. The hosty waxed lyrical about the Cultured butter she was about to serve me. Apparently it spoke three languages and had a degree in art history.
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While catching the train into Sydney I noticed everyone was glued, if not soldered, to their smartphone. An elderly Chinese man, similarly engaged, was shaking his head and tut-tutting. Perhaps not as culturally prone to public displays of dissatisfaction as we are in the West, I wondered what online information had so clearly annoyed him.
One wonders if Chinese society has been so driven to distraction by social media as we in the West have been. Every single person can now express themselves on the internet and everyone’s opinion must be included. In my day we left such people at Speaker’s Corner to froth, dribble and shout themselves hoarse. If we disagreed we could just leave. While these people are now more noticeable, the scary thing is that they have always been living among us.
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The trains in London seem be running fine though there are constant reminders that the timetable is the new 2024 timetable yet we are already in June.
Warnings about food allergies are now prominent in British pubs and restaurants. I have been frequently asked whether I suffer from any allergies even if I am ordering a beer. In one pub in Cornwall I saw a sign asking whether I suffer from food allergies or intolerance. Guilty as charged on the latter.
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A few weeks ago my old colleague, Jacob Rees-Mogg, was accosted by communists while he gave a talk in Cardiff at my alma mater, the University of Wales. The demo (rock-on!) was organised by the Cardiff Communists and the Welsh Underground Network both carrying flags of the Revolutionary Communist Party. I remember we had a Marxist stand for Student President when I was a student at Swansea in 1983. A mature student and clearly a right-on dude with leather jacket and droopy moustache, he was the only candidate. Another student, whom I will call Gerald, because I cannot remember his name, thought this was clearly ridiculous and so stood as well. He won with over 90% of the vote. The Left had clearly not worked out that we were Thatcher’s children and no longer had any truck with the Leftist nonsense of the 1970s.
I thought we had kicked the commies into touch especially with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which exposed the sheer incompetence of communist economies. I did much business in Eastern European stock markets in the 1990s and as a frequent visitor to these countries I saw firsthand the social and economic havoc wreaked by communism. I would not wish it on my worst enemy. I would not even wish it on Stalin and that is going some. However like vermin the communists will never be fully exterminated. All we can hope for is, like vermin, to keep their numbers down so that they cause no real damage.