Being a survivor, yes,  you sum it up well. I do daily bless the times when I enjoy certain foods that I went without in some places for years - and for many other things too..... such as safety. When you have gone without for over half your life because of circumstances then you do appreciate being a survivor. If this is hell it ain't bad, actually. Pass it on.
  I had to take  a  case load of cheese as my gift to Norwegian friends on my last visit to Oslo.  And wine..... Unable to carry the sort of quantities that might be appreciated I resorted to  several of the best quality boxed wines I could get. 
 I once took a wine box into a land that did not allow wine of any quality... I was not stopped for it but an official  at the xray place  asked if I knew I had an empty box in my luggage. In all honesty I said I did not know that I had an empty box in my luggage and trotted off with my case. Did he know or what?

Priscilla wrote:

  I had to take  a  case load of cheese as my gift to Norwegian friends on my last visit to Oslo. 

Something quite illegal to do now since January 1st should you ever attempt to repeat the same kind act of generosity. Norway may not be in the EU but it is in the EØS, so we can henceforth expect customs officials here to be acquiring a lot of free ham & cheese snacks courtesy of unwitting "turd country" vagrants (not my phrase - that of a very unhappy Surrey friend here). But please don't try smuggling in the Red Leicester stuff - even customs officials have taste buds here. Renegade Monk please, if you can get your hands on some before your whole economy goes down the tubes.

Meles meles wrote:

Actually Paul, although nowadays considered to be typically Scottish, the earliest written recipe for 'hagese' is from Lancashire (North-West England) and occurs in the verse cookbook 'Liber Cure Cocorum' written around 1430, which is about 50 years before the first written reference in Scotland. Haggis continued to regulalry appear in English cookery texts up to the 19th Century, and was clearly as loved or loathed in both England and Scotland, as it is now, as Gervaise Markham's 'English Huswife' of 1615 says, "That pudding which is called the Haggas or Haggus, of whose goodnesse it is in vain to boast, because there is hardly to be found a man that doth not affect them."

MM, thank you so much for the correction. And you are really an "as" (Southern Dutch word for Northern Dutch "krak" (master, expert)) in that cookery stuff and its history.

PS: MM, just to let you see how difficult it many times is to translate my Southern Dutch (I have only the experience of East and West Flemish, not those Dutch dialects from Brabant (Antwerp and around Brussels) and of course not from Limburg (nearly Platt Deutsch))

PPS: And MM of course not an "ass", but an "as" from the French word: "as"
https://dictionnaire.reverso.net/francais-neerlandais/as
"carte à jouer, champion" (English: ace)
Of course we have also in Dutch "aas" (English: bait)
Sigh: I feel with Comic Monster in his difficult task to translate English books to Spanish (Castilian Spanish?)...

PPPS: Apologies, especcially to Priscilla, to divert again this thread into...

Kind regards, Paul.

Meles meles wrote:

ham sandwiches are hardly a casus belli

A beef sandwich might be a casus pacis though. I was recently reading Londres by Pierre-Jean Grosley which is full of observations and humourous anecdotes about England stemming from the French magistrate's time in London in 1765. In a chapter about London's clubs he writes:

'Un miniſtre d’Etat paſſa 24 heures dans un jeu public, toujours occupé au point que, pendant ces 24 heures, il ne vécut que de quelques tranches de boeuf grillé, qu’il ſe faiſoit ſervir entre deux rôties de pain & qui mangeoit ſans quitter le jeu. Ce nouveau mets prit faveur pendant mon ſéjour à Londres: on le baptiſa du nom du miniſtre qui l’avoit imaginé, pour économiser le temps.'    

'A minister of state spent 24 hours at a game, fully engrossed to the point that during those 24 hours he ate nothing but a few slices of roast beef which he had served to him between two crusts of bread and eaten without leaving the game. This new snack gained favour during my stay in London; they named it after the minister who thought it up to save time.'  

Significantly he doesn't mention the name of the minister (John Montague, 4th Earl of Sandwich) but one assumes that his readers in France and England would already have been well aware of the name that he didn't need to. And indeed his book was well received in both France and England.

Meles meles wrote:

I've only been in the 'English Emporium' once, a few years ago, when I wanted to get a haggis for Burn's Night: he didn't have any and didn't know the significance of the date, and so ever since I've made my own. 

Got a translation in French:

Seems to be a work around, may become permanent:

40% of fish at Danish auction landed from Scottish boats

Now don't you start, Trike.  

With the derogatory mention of Little Englanders and red-faced Gammons, I was interested to read the following quote from JB Priestly's 1930s masterpiece, 'English Journey'. The suffering witnessed by the author during the Great Depression, he explains, turned him into a "Little Englander":
"That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love. And I considered how much I disliked Big Englanders, whom I saw as red-faced, staring loud fellows, wanting to go and boss everybody about all over the world. Patriots to a man. I wish their patriotism would begin at home."

Perhaps it's time for us little Englanders who are fond of England's little ways and customs, her small towns, the patchworks of woodland and field, the little hills and streams, and the overall smallness of the place, to turn away from notions of grandeur and try to reclaim the term. Oh dear you've caught me all misty-eyed and nostalgic this morning.

Meles meles wrote:

"That little sounds the right note of affection. It is little England I love. And I considered how much I disliked Big Englanders, whom I saw as red-faced, staring loud fellows, wanting to go and boss everybody about all over the world. Patriots to a man. I wish their patriotism would begin at home."

Perhaps it's time for us little Englanders who are fond of England's little ways and customs, her small towns, the patchworks of woodland and field, the little hills and streams, and the overall smallness of the place, to turn away from notions of grandeur and try to reclaim the term. Oh dear you've caught me all misty-eyed and nostalgic this morning.

That quote - and your comment - are the best things posted on this thread, MM. Thank you.

I've come over all misty-eyed and nostalgic, too... ! A bas les jambons! Bring back the true gentlefolk of England!

Temperance wrote:

Now don't you start, Trike.  

Too good a chance to miss, Temp.

I'm all for re appropriating the term - though concentrating on a pastoral view of England to the exclusion of its modern urban populations isn't probably a good route to a realistic assessment of the country for which one can retain (or regain) affection. However the close semantic relationship between "little" and "small", especially when gauging the minds of the country's inhabitants, means that it will be hard to extricate one from the other for the foreseeable future, I reckon, as long as small-mindedness itself forces attention upon it.

But there is an extremely serious and much ignored underlying requirement to such re-appropriation, or at least examination, of the term. England, of all the countries in the immediate group of which it is at once an integral member and a neighbour apart, is the one most lacking a broad brush-stroke definition of its national character, not as others see you but as you see yourselves. While stereotypes are rarely helpful and should be avoided, lack of a lazy assumption regarding national character that can at least be recognised by everyone within that nation leads to something probably worse - the freedom for every individual to invent and invest in such a character that most closely suits their own bias without requirement to recognise any challenge to their assumption, be it towards a pastoral idyll of simple decent folk or a vile xenophobic and brutal bigotry-ridden society of atavists.

The one true elephant in this room, since the Scottish independence pachyderm led the way at the outset and admitted so many more, has been English nationalism - what is it when it's at home and to what extent can it be predicated on an agreed nature of identity? Only English people can truly resolve this issue, and what everyone else is justifiably nervous about is how much collateral damage the English inflict on others while they tear themselves apart in resolving this issue for once and for all. Priestly's quote shows that this is not by any means a new dilemma the English must resolve, but if anything the urgency involved in the task now is greater even than in his time and the price to be paid by everyone, including the English, in deferring or avoiding this necessary discourse all the greater too.

Thinking of English identity is there an actual English national costume?  Google turned up a couple of items trying to make Saxon style clothing* a national costume.  What is the English national costume? - Answers   National Costume of England - National Dress (projectbritain.com)  

*  Meaning the style of dress of the 'Anglo-Saxons' not of the inhabitants of the German region of Saxony.

Wasn't the mini-skirt a little English costume in its day? Not sure myself, it was hard to Quant-ify.

Temperance wrote:

A bas les jambons!

If a roast beef sandwich is the grand-daddy of all sandwiches, then I'm actually looking forward to enjoying (for lunch later this week) the chief of all sandwiches - un jambon-beurre.



Some people stick Dijon mustard and cornichons and even cheese in it too, but for me it just has to be classic - baguette bread, unsalted butter, ham and nothing else. But what kind of ham, one might ask? Well, whichever ham one likes I suppose. We've actually still got some ham left over from Christmas, cooked up from some quality Irish gammon from County Tyrone. Being from Northern Ireland its EU or non-EU provenance is debateable. Having been produced and bought before 2021 I suppose makes it EU ham either way.

I not sold on the idea of Danish ham though, but I'm sure that there's some really good stuff there. I just have visions of bright pink, extremely salty, Danish salami compared to the real deal from Naples and Milan which probably colours my view. In Londres, Pierre-Jean Grosley includes a hilarious typo (which I think is deliberate) regarding Britain’s then 2 foreign offices, the Southern Department and the Northern Department. These were generally delineated along confessional lines – i.e. the Southern Department being for catholic countries in southern Europe while the Northern Department was for protestant countries in northern Europe. Indeed, the Earl of Sandwich was Secretary of State for the Northern Department at the time when Grosley was in London. In that section either he or his typesetter spells ‘le Danemarck’ as ‘le Damnemarck’.

In the book Grosley considers himself a bit of a foody. He says that before he came to England, he had been told of 'l’excellence de la viande que l’on mange en Angleterre' but having tried the meat for himself he wasn’t that impressed. The beef, for example, he says is too fatty - ſa graiſſe énorme - and the flesh too soft compared to that which he is used to in France. This he puts down to English pastures being too lush and green and the climate too mild unlike in France where he says hotter summers and colder winters cause the cattle to produce a much more tempered meat. Make of that what you will.

He praises Manx mutton and lamb though. He says that the island’s mountainous terrain and exposure to the sea winds makes the meat better than the English equivalent. One wonders, however, how much he was influenced by what seems to have been an 18th century version of regional branding and just what percentage of lamb marketed by London butchers in 1765 as ‘Manx lamb’ had actually been anywhere near the Irish Sea.

Conversely, he has a high opinion of English bread - bon & délicat - with a lot of crumb ‘beaucoup de mie’. This he puts down to the use by English bakers of brewer’s yeast - la levure de bière - and claims that Paris and indeed the whole of Europe should be indebted to England for this innovation – dont l’Europe aura pareillement obligation à l’Angleterre. Again, make of that what you will.

That was then, however, and this is now. So don’t get too dewy-eyed Meles. The lush, green pastures are always greener of the other side of La Manche.

Vizzer wrote:

  So don’t get too dewy-eyed Meles. The lush, green pastures are always greener on the other side of La Manche.

No, they're not.  

You go as dewy-eyed as you like, MM, over our little bit of the island. Here's the music for it.

Birds are starting to sing again today. I live in Devon. I have a January daffodil in my garden.  Reasons to be cheerful: Parts 105, 106 and 107. Plus Vaughan Williams, 108.

Funny you should post that Temp: after coming over all moist and dewy this morning, I listened to his English Folk Song Suite and then his Fantasia on the theme by Thomas Tallis, before taking the dog on a bracing walk through the slushy French/Catalan countryside to get all that nostalgic English wetness worked out of my system. I much prefer those two pieces to his Lark, although perhaps that's just because the bloody bird has become a bit too clichéed of late?

No daffodills here yet, but my broad beans are already poking through the snow.

I actually prefer his Fantasia - probably because I'm also a fan of TT. When I first had my heart broken half a century ago, I spent hours moping happily to it (would shake head at this point at the follies of one's youth, but had better not, in case I go dizzy...) .

We actually, in spite of all the present anger, confusion, fear and misery here, don't know we have been born. Oh, to be England, now that - anything really. But not Birmingham. I draw the line at Birmingham, as, indeed, did Jane Austen.

.... or Slough!

...or Bude the Obscure.

Not sure if this counts as an elephant or a rabbit.

The Brits are going to dig a big tunnel to Ireland - or Northern Ireland, that is. The plans have apparently been passed by whoever it is approves of these mad ideas, and the venture has already been dubbed "Boris's Burrow" The Burrow is expected to cost £10 billion. Where is all this money coming from?

I hope the IRA won't be tempted to blow it - and our £10 billion - up just after the opening ceremony. A tempting target, I should have thought (seriously).

As with most things prefixed by "Boris-" it is neither an elephant nor a rabbit. It is a herring, of a particularly claret hue.

An independent Scotland, fostering neighbourly relations with a unified Ireland, would probably welcome this generous gift from England whose people, despite their much impoverished status, could still find it in their kind hearts to cough up the billions required for such a selfless gesture to their friends. Rather than blow it up, I reckon there is more chance of the IRA being all too ready to cut the ribbon on its opening day.

At £10 billion it sounds an absolute bargain to me: the Channel tunnel's cost finally amounted to £9 billion (equivalent to £16 billion in 2016), and that's a shorter route through shallower and geologically less difficult terrain (the Beaufort's Dyke between Northern Ireland and Galloway is a 300m deep sea trench which, even if this was not obstacle enough, was used for dumping munitions after World War II and so would require an expensive cleanup operation). It all sounds rather fanciful to me. Is there really a financial case for this? The Channel tunnel carries huge volumes of essential trade and yet it still required its over-budget costs to be eventually written off by the UK and French governments as the loans could never be realistically repaid just from the operating profit.

I know nothing about railway civil engineering, but could this - besides the Scottish/Irish thing - be a bit of a problem?

The gauge need not be a problem. As your map shows Spain and Portugal have a different gauge to the majority of continental Europe but they are still linked to the Trans-European high-speed rail network (TEN-R). Throughout Europe most high-speed lines are actually separate from the rest of the domestic network since not only do they need to be to a standard guage but they must be rated for high speed use. Hence although the domestic rail network in Portugal and Spain is to a markedly different gauge, you can still take high-speed, long-distance trains from Lisbon, Seville, or Madrid etc, direct through to all other major cities throughout Europe. Freight traffic is also often on separate dedicated lines. So should the Irish rail network ever be linked through to the UK's, it would just require a dedicated line to be built, or the track simply relaid, linking just the main Irish cities and conforming to European standard gauge, and at the same time probably upgraded to Trans-European high-speed standards.

Can you just imagine it, taking a train from Dublin all the way through to Lisbon, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest or Istanbul? With a proper sleeping and dining car I would love to do that.

Gosh, yes, but at my age I'd want to travel first-class, of course - with all the appropriate luggage and clothes - like something out of an Agatha Christie book (but without murders, or any other unpleasantness).

Yes, one could cope with this, Dublin to Budapest etc.

The problem for me - as well as the cost, of course - would be that nowadays it would likely be high-speed. I was thinking more of: evening dinner as we travel south of Paris, a nightcap before bed as we traverse deepest rural France, then breakfast as we trundle along the Mediterranean coast, before arriving, say in Avignon, about lunchtime. Tour the city and then reboard the train about early evening. Dinner as we travel along the Cote d'Azur and on into northern Italy, arriving in Venice the next morning. Spend the day in Venice before reboarding the train and going on overnight and through the next day down the Balkans, to arrive in Istanbul the following afternoon. Then after a day or two there, returning in a similarly genteel fashion via Budapest, Vienna (with an evening at the Opera perhaps), Prague, Cologne and Paris. Something like that.

I have actually gone by train, via Paris, Venice and Belgrade, to Istanbul (and then on down to Izmir, Ankara and Iskenderun), to return via Istanbul again, Munich and Cologne to Calais - but it was in second-class on slow domestic trains - so not exactly the height of luxury.

Meles meles wrote:

Can you just imagine it, taking a train from Dublin all the way through to Lisbon, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Vienna, Budapest or Istanbul? With a proper sleeping and dining car I would love to do that.

 
MM, "je neemt mij de woorden uit de mond" (you take the words out of my mouth?). Yes, Dublin...That's to say that you could in train without ever seeing seawater travel from nordmann's Dublin to any capital city in the rest  of Europe...and even travelling through the "English part" of Europe...? "Amazing" would a Greek Macedonian contributor have said in the time...

I said "nordmann's Dublin" while he directed me to a pub (with address!), when I said to plan a visit to Ireland and staying in Dublin. And if I recall it well, he also once said later that he was a "garçon" in such a pub. I guess, it could have been this one...

Kind regards, Paul.

MM wrote:

I have actually gone by train, via Paris, Venice and Belgrade, to Istanbul, and then back via Munich and Cologne to Calais, but it was in second-class on an inter-rail ticket ... so not exactly the height of luxury.

And one of the best holidays I ever had in Europe was in an old campervan - not much money, but lots of time to wander about, and lots of good (cheap) food, wine etc. But we were all much, much younger then. I expect the people you get on posh trains would be pains - there must be a happy medium. We'll have to hire a Res His Slow Express and do a History Tour of Europe. We could miss out the English bit of the continent, I suppose, to keep everyone happy.  

OOPS MM, as I see it now it would only be for the Scots meeting their Irish friends...? For "us" (sorry to be so egocentric) here in Belgium and from the Belgian coast first to take a car or bus to Calais or take a train to Brussels (one hour to start with) and then all that way by high speed to the North of England...
The alternatives nowadays:
https://www.rome2rio.com/map/Brussels/Dublin-Port-Tunnel#r/Train-bus-and-ferry
or:
https://www.rome2rio.com/map/Brussels/Dublin-Port-Tunnel#r/Fly-from-Brussels
Sorry to be that an economic calculating one...nothing "poetic" I know...
Kind regards, Paul.

Temperance wrote:

I expect the people you get on posh trains would be pains ...

I did once watch a youtube of a journey in lovely restored Pullman cars following the Venice to Paris route of the Orient Express. The passengers were mostly loud, brash, wealthy, old Americans, who insisted on photgraphing every dish served, moaned to the poor waiting staff that their tornedos Rossini came with a gratin Dauphinois rather than MacDonald's fries, generally didn't know which fork to use and even thought a cocktail dress or lounge suit was suitable dress for evening dinner    . Actually I think I'd probably hate it: no wonder there was murder on the Orient Express.

Meles meles wrote:

Temperance wrote:

I expect the people you get on posh trains would be pains ...

Actually I think I'd probably hate it: no wonder there was murder on the Orient Express.

There'd probably be murder on the Res His Express, too!

The multiplicity of gauges is even more pronounced in the narrow guage world I infest as gricer and volunteer. In Wales alone there are at least 6 narrow gauges, from 2'6" down to 15" (anything less than that tends to be lumped into the "miniature" bracket. It has its compensations, though - at the WLLR we have (or have had) locos from a Scottish gasworks, an Antiguan sugar plantation, a French-built Wehrmacht loco that worked in Austria, two Romanian locos, a Taiwanese sugar railway, two Admiralty ordnance depots, the Sierra Leone government railway, Finland, an English paper works and the two built for the line from new. And lots of visitors for Galas etc. Currently we are trying to save a Shropshire-built steam railcar which is mouldering away in Sri Lanka.

Meles meles wrote:

At £10 billion it sounds an absolute bargain to me: the Channel tunnel's cost finally amounted to £9 billion (equivalent to £16 billion in 2016), and that's a shorter route through shallower and geologically less difficult terrain (the Beaufort's Dyke between Northern Ireland and Galloway is a 300m deep sea trench which, even if this was not obstacle enough, was used for dumping munitions after World War II and so would require an expensive cleanup operation). It all sounds rather fanciful to me. Is there really a financial case for this? The Channel tunnel carries huge volumes of essential trade and yet it still required its over-budget costs to be eventually written off by the UK and French governments as the loans could never be realistically repaid just from the operating profit.

Well HS2 is currently expected to cost at least double the original £55,000,000,000 (looks more written out, doesn't it) original "funding envelope" (brown paper one presumably) so how much Bozo's Bolthole would actually cost makes my eyes water.

Meles meles wrote:

...The passengers were mostly loud, brash, wealthy, old Americans....

Back in the day Americans on the Orient Express or in any murderous environment as described by Agatha knew their place - limited to one individual whose function was to become the prime loud, brash, wealthy suspect until they themselves were bumped off in Chapter 7, leaving the floor to an inordinate number of upper middle class English players who turned up at every crime scene with only their names altered on each occasion, plus the one other available "foreigner" slot normally filled either by a Hungarian with a limp, an inscrutable oriental (the Orient Expressionless), or maybe even a Scot. The culprit would then be identified by an English speaking Belgian whose grasp of French was apparently limited to one word ejaculations and for whom a Walloon was simply a funny foreigner way of describing an inflatable rubber party accessory.

For speed readers a handy way of getting through a Christie in record time was simply to hop over the first few and last few paragraphs in any chapter, thereby automatically skipping over all the obvious red herrings and finding only the salient pointers to the actual culprit. It also meant one of course avoided Americans.

Irish seaborder put in question again?

https://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/politics/dup-urges-pm-boris-johnson-to-restore-ni-ability-to-trade-freely-with-rest-of-uk-3143075

From a Belfast Newsletter?

I thought I understood it, but at the end, as they say overhere:"  'n kat zou er zijn jongen niet meer in terugvinden"
(a cat wouldn't find back its offspring? in it anymore)

What's that now "again!"?

Some odd goings-on in Scotland at the moment - not that it is any of the business of the English to fret about it all, of course. But the silence here is deafening. The original Res His elephant was a wee Scottish beastie - is there another MacNelly on the loose up there?

Glorious day here in England - warm and sunny, with a gentle breeze off the Atlantic - daffodils and primroses everywhere. Spring at last, after a long and miserable winter.

Deleted.

Temp, overhere yesterday too...bright sun and 19°C (66°Fahrenheit)...in the garden with already the summer lounger...and nature is reacting too...

And longing for the first jab...and in Belgium a lot of turmoil about it...
Some politician here said we are in a state of war...the European Union has to be tougher in obtaining their promised and ordered vaccines...

Some don't understand that Britain, Israel to call but two have received more and earlier...
https://cutt.ly/alRE3UB
From the site:
On 17 February, the tracker showed that Belgium had vaccinated 4% of its population against Covid-19, the same as Germany. France (4.3%) and the Netherlands (4.5%) have both pulled ahead, but Luxembourg (3.6%) remains behind.
Thus not so much less than its neighbours, except Britain...Why then that turmoil?...

And if I understand it well the vaccines have to be obtained via the EU...
Is the EEC beaten in the sprint by the much cleverer Bojo and at the end will win some support in comparison with the EU? Among the broader population?

The EU a bit as the France of Colbert? Too much mercantilism against abroad and at the same time neglecting the inner market? Or no that failure, but more the murdering bureaucracy and too many superfluous rules? Against a Dutch Republic and Britain?
https://cutt.ly/NlRPmnc

I wonder what Nielsen thinks there in Denmark...and a Dirk Marinus after all grown up in the North of Holland?

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

And if I understand it well the vaccines have to be obtained via the EU...

No, healthcare policy is overseen by national governments rather than the EU and that includes purchasing vaccines. However the 27 did agree very early on (June 2020) under the leadership of Berlin and Paris to pool procurement. This was essential to avoid a repeat of the deadly free-for-all that occurred last March with masks, PPE and medical equipment, as member states tried to outbid each other. All EU states agreed to guarantee that each would have equal access, proportionate to their population size, and above all that each would apply the same vaccine purchase conditions: otherwise, how would, say, Luxembourg, Slovenia or Finland have fared against the pharmaceutical giants? In return the EU offered potential vaccine suppliers considerable financial aid aimed at speeding up production, all this being put in place well before there were any vaccines proven to be effective. There was and still is nothing to prevent states from purchasing their own vaccines in addition to those obtained via the EU: I believe Germany and Hungary have both made such independent purchases of extra vaccines, but these will certainly not be under conditions as favourable as those obtained via the EU in terms of price, delivery guarantees and civil liability.

According to the Guardian (usually a reasonable and reliable source), 28% of the population is the UK vaccination figure, as of 24th February. As far as I know, no one has "keeled over" after his or her jab.

But my post above was muddled: I was talking about the Scottish elephant, not vaccines or, really, the weather.

My point, poorly made, was that the quite monstrous elephant around here is the silence that descends when the UK seems to be doing something well, and other nations or "organisations" (Lord Frost used the word "organisation" of the EU, a term which apparently infuriated M. Barnier) mess up. All hell is about to break loose in Scotland (watch former First Minister, Alex Salmond, give evidence around 12.30 pm today, BBC News Channel) and, if we are to believe what we have read, even the Germans are saying they envy the Brits' vaccine programme. Any mention of such things here? Of course not.

But pointing this out is futile - as others wiser than I have noted. I regret the absence of old posters, but am reluctantly realising that their departure was probably the only honest response.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56198842

Sorry MM and Temp I have only time this evening...I wanted to point to what nordmann said about Bojo and money...is it all that with the multinationals?...as MM said "avoid to outbid each other"...each life is not equal as usual...question of money?...my sister says it is all one big maffia where "money" is king...free market the liberal way?...
Kind regards, Paul.

I have twice commended the NHS here for their management of the vaccination programme in Britain, so I hope your accusation was not levelled at me, Temp. On both occasions I commented that it was indicative of how well things can actually be done in the UK when control is transferred from the present ruling party and their cronies and handed over to intelligent, responsible and capable people. If that is the sentiment that caused you to apparently dismiss my commendation of where your country can indeed excel then I admit there is probably more motive behind your approbation than mere logic might dictate.

The Salmond thing is indeed an interesting case. It reminds me very much of a similar incident in Irish politics - so one with which you can probably be forgiven for being unfamiliar - in which a former party leader and Taoiseach decided to adopt a "conspiracy defence" when accused of serious wrongdoing in a public tribunal. The tribunal's findings were to return an open verdict on his wrongdoing though with much yet to be explained by him and a ruling that he could not attempt to regain public office until such explanation was ratified by a court of law, along with a decision that were he to substitute "collusion" for "conspiracy" in his own allegation he might indeed have had a point. However "conspiring" to protect the public interest by barring someone from power and influence who faced serious criminal charges was an incorrect use of the term. His defence failed, and I imagine Salmond's might well also, especially after Sturgeon and Murrell have their say in the inquiry too.

However all of the above hardly addresses the apparent point of your post - which is to criticise what you have interpreted as anti-British sentiment here. There is much that can be said by way of purely objective observation regarding the present UK government's conduct and performance record which, being almost by definition negative, might be construed by others as being motivated by quasi-racist sentiment. But I would hasten to advise those "others", and yourself if you align with them, that this particular accusation, when examined, frequently falls foul of Queen Gertrude's excellent rule of thumb in these matters as recorded by Wobbleweapon.

The other lesson from Willie's astute examination of political motive in the same work, of course, is to always be aware of "the play within the play". In the same tradition of excellent drama of a Caledonian bent I imagine the Edinburgh performance of this modern version over the coming week should not fail to satisfy either.

Old posters, should they emerge from self-exile, accidental ignominy, licentious linguistic laxity that lethargy of logic lets loose, and/or rabbit holes of their choosing, are always welcome back. Not quite with Boris Johnson's version of "open arms" with which he regularly threatens to envelop the burgeoning ranks of the British poor (as if he hasn't done enough to them), but rather with the more intellectually honest variety that allows for discord without disdain, disagreement without disembowelment and with dudgeons un-hoist.

Or, if a good flounce to stage left is the preferred option then remember, style is everything ...

Didn't realise you were a ginge, nordmann! Never trust a ginger cat. The only sort of cat that ever got the better of the late, lamented Bosworth.

PS Trying to argue with nordmann:

MM and Temp, a bit late and read now also nordmann's reply...
In the Priscilla thread when he replied to me about the money Bojo's UK (not Bojo, but the taxpayer) had to pay 7 times more than the EU...but as I now read it on Associated Press news...if you can trust the publishers...it is not money only that counts, but also more complex reasons as bureaucracy and reluctance to flexible and fast business negociations to gain time in vaccines deliveries and perhaps it will at the end be the EU, which will have to take the blame for the slow vaccination and lower vaccination procent?...

Perhaps for gaining time in delivery you need more money? Here is time certainly money? 
As I found it confirmed in an article of "Politico" (European branch). And as I read it quick decision making is very important? Although the common advantages for the small countries into a bigger unity as the EU? Of course a small rich country as Israel has a much shorter chain of decision making than a big mastodon as the EU and the US (China and Russia don't count for me as they are not democratic). Although the US seems to have done it also well, due to a more liberal market mindset?

Kind regards, Paul.

PS: edited and reworked after the tip of nordmann and Temperance.
PPS: edited the message again, while I find that it is important to prove with my sources that I am not saying "n'importe quoi" (just anything? just rubbish? Dutch: "om het even wat")
https://apnews.com/article/business-europe-coronavirus-pandemic-united-kingdom-france-f3c52a16bec8b9a996e1d61bd4e24f7d
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-coronavirus-vaccine-struggle-pfizer-biontech-astrazeneca/

Tip, Paul. More than one link in a post and nobody reads it (for the thousandth time).

Anyway, we're on to cats now.

What a horrible cat picture.

But then I am very distressed this morning because someone has told me my picture of the silly feline falling off his chair may have shown an animal deliberately and cruelly twisted into position just for a photo shoot. I hope not - I have seen moggies get themselves in worse messes entirely without human intervention. I hope he was all right after his contortions and subsequent fall.

Perhaps the biggest elephant in this room is our combined foolishness:  age, experience and education notwithstanding, we are all as daft as the kids.

WW's Puck said it all about mortals and foolishness, but forgot to mention, of course, that the entire mess he was contemplating was all his fault. Mmm - you can't beat our Wobbleweapon for irony. Don't trust anything Gertrude says, by the way - nasty piece of work that one - bad wife and terrible mother. Bit of a cow actually, like Lady M. Always protesting herself.

Paul, nordmann is right - one link per post is an elegant sufficiency. Don't over-egg the pudding, so to speak. Eggy toast is nice, but eggy posts get, like said puddings, just a tad too eggy.


Edit: Nothing at all to do with elephants, but just found out something about Gertrude and the significance of "imperial jointress". Didn't know Danish monarchs were elected. This is from the Guardian:

Why Didn't Hamlet Become King??

But surely the reference to "jointress" does not suggest Denmark itself could have been part of Gertrude's jointure?

Gertrude is described as "our sometime sister, now our queen; the imperial jointress to this warlike state", which means that she possessed a legal jointure: an invention of the Tudor legal system that allowed a man to leave his estate to his widow rather than his children. The line suggests, therefore, that there was some legal contract through which Gertrude would inherit the country after King Hamlet's death.

Is the vaccination campaign of Covid19 entering a "political" phase?

Now with the Sputnik V vaccin?
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210308-eu-medical-official-warns-of-sputnik-jab-russian-roulette
"The head of the management board at the EU's medicines regulator warned late Sunday against emergency national authorisations of Russia's Sputnik V vaccine, comparing the idea to "Russian roulette"."
Not the best comparison in my book to start negociations on the vaccin?
And perhaps again a reason for differences between "rest-EU?" (remaining EU?) and the UK? What will be the attitude of the UK against Sputnik V? Too anti-Westerner to enter?

And now the Brexit's Northern Ireland again:
https://www.newsletter.co.uk/health/coronavirus/arlene-foster-suggests-uk-could-give-surplus-covid-19-vaccines-to-republic-of-ireland-3157475
 
Is it to tease or just political background?
Just saying to the Irish from the Republic and a party within NI: You see we did it that better than the bureaucratic EU and now we can ask you stupid ones to have something from our surplus vaccins. That occurs when you ar part of such an "elephant" like the EU...

Alas, no one in the UK is fretting about about vaccines or Brexit (what was that exactly?) or Northern Ireland (sorry) - we are all reeling from Season Whatever, Episode ??? of The Crown.

Someone should remind of HRH Prince Henry of Wales of this:

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/jan/12/prince-harry-racism