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antonverein16 апреля 2018 г.And jokes don’t really work in a utopia. Jokes need to be about incompetence, or weakness, or misfortune. A nation that likes to laugh can’t really be sitting round at the same time patting itself on the back for the provision of universal healthcare, or their near-comprehensive rail system, or the imminent arrival of a global pageant like the Olympics.
045- antonverein16 апреля 2018 г.Читать далее
It’s as much a constant as the fact that, while Britain is a country that gets a lot done, the national debate will always be dominated by that minority of the population who are Romantic, and perennially disappointed, rather than the majority, who are Pragmatic and therefore off actually doing stuff. And that smaller group has made up its mind on certain things and will not be shifted. The NHS is a disaster, Terminal Five doesn’t work, all MPs are corrupt, the Olympics will make the place a laughing stock. The BBC, the school system, public order, the multicultural experiment, country life. Everything is in terminal decline, and it doesn’t matter how much contradictory evidence you present. Even if a global survey places the country in the top ten places to live worldwide, you’re not having any of it.
027 - antonverein13 апреля 2018 г.Читать далее
Great crowd in Wolverhampton, but can’t keep a secret to save their lives.
Not a very forgiving town either. We dug out a copy of the local paper, the Express and Star, and found, thrillingly, an editorial calling for witches not to be pardoned. This is particularly ironic in a town whose coal and iron industries caused so much local pollution that it is generally thought that J. R. R. Tolkien used it as the model for Mordor in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Orcs, yes; witches no, in the Black Country.036 - antonverein13 апреля 2018 г.
G. K. Chesterton once remarked that ‘the tragedy of the English conquest of Ireland in the seventeenth century is that the Irish can never forget it and the English can never remember it.
028 - antonverein13 апреля 2018 г.
High Wycombe has an extraordinary tradition of weighing its mayor at the start of their year-long term and then again at the end to see if they have put on weight by living it large at the ratepayers’ expense. The weigh-in is done in public and, if the mayor has filled out a little, the town crier announces it by shouting, ‘And some more!’ to the crowd. Then they take the mayor round the back and beat the shit out of him.
027 - antonverein5 апреля 2018 г.
There is nothing more relaxing to an audience than finding out a burglar is on the run the very night they’re sitting in a theatre on top of a shopping centre in Preston. A thousand people suddenly started mentally listing all the windows and doors in their homes, and trying to remember whether they’d locked them.
022 - antonverein5 апреля 2018 г.
Fort Regent looms solidly over St Helier. Built in the early 1800s as a response to the French invasion of 1781, it is a proper military keep with dense, high walls and set at a strategic location facing France. The absence of any other subsequent French invasion could be taken as proof of its success as a deterrent, although Napoleon may have had other priorities by that stage. It was de-militarized in 1927, in good time for the German invasion of 1940.
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