Good piece here by Craig Murray, about the fact that the infamous war on moisture seems to have been a bit far-fetched.
Now, I have been buzzing all around the world this year, Frankfurt, Paris, Johannesburg, Dublin, etc, so I really care about two things; firstly being safe, and second, slightly at odds with the first, not being inconvenienced when travelling.
Turns out that the whole thing looks very either contrived, or incompetent depending on how "tin foil hattissh" you are feeling, (You read about this emotion here first.) . Meanwhile, we are all wandering round with little plastic bags full of soap, because somehow we're going to make this into explosives, and so we cannot have too much of it.
Of course, what hope that someone is now going to suddenly say: "Ooops, sorry, seem to have gone off at half cock there, you can put it all back now!" Right. So, its ziploc baggies and small portions for the rest of the long emergency.
So, that's been the frustration of the week. Not safer, not more convenient.
Went to London last week for a meeting with an English Bank, which for the usual secret squirrel commercial reasons I cannot name, and I had to go to Heathrow, as rather than having the meeting in the City, and going via the very convenient and well-managed London City airport, I had to go to the SAP UK headquarters in Feltham. I hate doing this, because, I as said before, London Heathrow is the largest open-cast toilet in the Northern Hemisphere, and the least pleasant airport that I have to pass through, and I am including the horrendously badly thought out Malpensa in this list of shame, so you know it is bad... (Malpensa actually more or less means "bad thoughts" in Italian, so that is highly ironic.)
The next thing I have to do is get a taxi, from terminal four to SAP, which is a real trauma for the following reason. The cabbies have queued for up to two hours to get to the head of the line, and so when you say that you are only going a couple of kilometres, they go ballistic. (In spite of the fact that they can go back to the head of the queue if they are back within a certain time.) So, this time the charming man who was driving the cab greeted me with a cheery "for fuck's sake."
At first I thought I would just ignore it, but then I thought, who is paying who here? So when I got out of the cab after rather chilly ten minute trip, and went to the window to pay, I said:
"Before I pay you, would you like to apologise for swearing at me?"
Apparently, in Russian, swearing is called mat, and there is one recurring joke, where a sea captain comes up on deck, and trips over something left on the deck, whereupon he shouts:
"what poxy shit filled cunt left that fucking arse of a thing there!" or whatever the speaker can come up with as an obscenity, but then always the same punchline. ...and then he started to swear profusely...
And then he did, indeed, start to swear profusely.
Go to Germany, Finland, Sweden, France, Italy, anywhere, no other countries inhabitants are as rude and ignorant, or at least not the taxi drivers...
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