Little grey cells

For reasons that’ll be made clear later in this post, I’ve not been able to produce my lengthy uber-rants lately. As Jade would say, ‘Thanks for that.’
What I hope to have for you all tomorrow is a bit of festive fun that you might enjoy for some short time during the long wait for the New Year fireworks, or in quiet moments when Wii and charades pall, or in the car on the way to hate rallies in 2010. It’s a treasure that I have enjoyed since the Dawn of Civilisation (1979), and one that I’ll be delighted to pass on for you, my friends, to enjoy and hand down through the generations as a family inheritance, like cleft palates or Napoleonic levels of self-confidence.

For today, though, it’s snippets of life in this jewel set in a silver sea that is New Labour’s Britain.

*****

Donkey’s years.

My oldest (living, mortal) friends are in dire financial straits. The Greatest Economic Leader of All Time has all but destroyed the private sector profession through which this married couple have prospered or sometimes just made ends meet, over the recent decades. With a mortgage to pay and their typically Tory selfish addiction to protein, carbohydrates, fats and vitamins still stubbornly surviving in the spiritual and anti-materialist paradise that is Albion, Mrs. Best-Friend had applied to work in the huge apparatus of the Welfare State. (As the Jewish kamikaze pilot said when asked why he did it: Hey, it’s a living.)
Mrs. Best-Friend asked me to be a character (as distinct from an employment) referee. Mrs. B-F and I have never worked together as such - unless you count charity work and spreading the Gospel According to Maggie Thatcher as work, which I don’t. It’s personal. I sent them my office phone number and my extension (guess how many sixes it has in it?) and awaited their call.
Commendably prompt, the HR person from the Department for Hurt and Awful Nuisances (Ultimo West Division) contacted me. After the questions about Mrs. Best-Friend’s employment history (you’ll recognise the appropriateness and efficiency of professional recruiters asking work-related questions of a character referee) and her honesty and integrity: about which I could justly fountain praise and adoration, she asked me how long I’d know Mrs. B-F.
I replied ‘Since 1979.’ (That year again. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you.)
‘Let me work that out,’ replied that HR-qualified, multi kilo-Sov per year salaried personnel recruiter in the arithmetically difficult year of 2009.
‘That’s thirty years,’ I explained to the Arse of Bo, politely.
‘Thanks,’ she replied, and went away happily knowing that your taxes have been spent on an education system that is the envy of the (animist headhunter pygmy) world.

Later on a thought struck me.
It happens.
Thirty years probably isn’t very long in liberal judge sentencing a violent criminal years.

*****

Little grey (monastery) cells.

Is it just me, or did the Christmas episode of Agatha Christie's Christmas Poirot this year display just the teeniest little bits of pro-western cultural propaganda?
Firstly, we saw Poirot doing his rosary: this from a character who, in his brilliant David Suchet incarnation, hasn’t shown much if any religious inclination that I can recall.
Later on, we heard a character being referred to as being involved in anti-slavery investigations for the Foreign Office and later still another character declaimed that the salve trade hadn’t been wholly abolished, except for in the West: in the East (and it was obvious here that they meant the Middle East) slavers are still commissioning the abduction of specific racial types, and I thought that it was implied they were intended for harems.
Later still, with the villains unmasked and the victims set free, Poirot recommends to the newly-enfranchised heroine/victim to find solace in faith - via the rosary - and from the hope that came last from Pandora’s Box.

The atheist weiner-whiners have spotted some significance about this over at IMDB.

Still, there was an evil nun and Tim Curry, so it wasn’t all a one-sided victory for Enlightened Christendom (and in subtext perhaps for modern Judaism too) over the rest.
But still.

*****

Plague.

It’s not fair.

Mrs. Northwester had a version of this virus just before Christmas, and though it slowed her down it didn’t prevent her shopping or preparing for Christmas or cooking. I’ve got the deluxe version, however. Whereas her sniffles and aches merely slowed her down in the final stretch of Advent, I can scarcely move myself off the sofa to change DVDs when they’re finished (something that even the best remote control can’t do - and the poor girl has to rest some time), and it’s all I can do to life the nutritious little snacks that she brings me to my trembling, pallid lips.

But I must soldier on and not complain. Just as it is my deep humility alone that prevents my genius becoming monstrous, my stoicism reminds me that the world does not revolve around Yours Truly, and I have work to do for the millions who eagerly await my New Year’s Eve Party-Time Special.

Till tomorrow, peeps. Keep it real, and keep to the right.