In which the pond takes a look at the English and Little England ...

 

The few who ploughed their way through the pond's late arvo post yesterday in tribute to the fallen, now fully authoritarian, United States might have had a nagging doubt.

What of the English? How does the pond keep track of the English and the doings of Little England and the misery of the miserable Sir Keir?

As the pond's taking tomorrow off to have a procedure, the pond thought another late arvo post might be helpful.

First a little back story, a little history of the pond's relationship to the plucky English. Back in the day, the ABC was basically an outpost for the BBC ... and if you happen to listen to News Radio at night, it still is, what with the BBC World Service supplying what the locals can't afford to do, which is run a 24/7 news service without repeating stories every five minutes, then turning to the Beeb to fill in (no doubt because the ABC generously insists on shamelessly surrendering to lobbyists and gifting handsome amounts of money to ill-advisedly sacked stringers).

So the pond was force fed on the English, their Queen, their flag (still tucked away in a corner), their kids magazines (Fleetway), their books for kids (Enid and Alice), and their never-ending colonial condescension.

An English-tainted sensa huma still survives.

For example, of late, for its toilet reading, the pond has been slowly going through Hesketh Pearson's bio Gilbert and Sullivan, available in the archive in dodgy form here.

It's replete with reminders of Englishness, and that notorious sensa huma.

When mentioning G & S, it's just a short jump to one of their junkie stars and the Grossmith brothers celebration of Mr Pooter in The Diary of a Nobody ...

There's also always Dickens, from whom the pond derived a few stylistic ticks ...

CHAPTER LVII. IN WHICH THE PICKWICK CLUB IS FINALLY DISSOLVED, AND EVERYTHING CONCLUDED TO THE SATISFACTION OF EVERYBODY (the whole at Project Gutenberg)

From there it's but a quick jump to jokes of the Goons kind, along the lines of "draw the blinds", "but I don't have a pencil", sadly not included in the wiki of running Goon jokes.

And from there it's an equally quick jump to Hancock's Half Hour ...

Mother: Would you like some tea, Jimmy? 
Jim: Tea? Tea?! Is that your answer to it all? Tea?! The panacea of the middle class! The answer to all the problems facing mankind today? Have a cup of tea Jim! You both make me sick. You're dead, both of you. You're both mentally dead. Your souls are drowned in tea. Your minds are clogged up with tea bags. You're like two slop basins swimming around in a sea of tea! Just like this country, the whole rotten system, stained in a tea of apathy! 
Father: What's he mean, Mum? 
Mother: I don't think he wants a tea. Would you like a cup of coffee, then? 
Jim: Coffee!? Coffee?! Is that your only alternative to the stagnant mess that's slowly choking you, a cup of coffee!? 
Mother: No, we've got some cocoa, I think.

(You can hear the performance of Look Back In Hunger at the 1960 East Cheam Drama Festival here).

From there it's an even shorter distance to the cracking Crace, always having fun, as in Hate, hate again, hate better - for Farage the country needs educating about foreigners.

Just a teaser, just a sampler, just a soupçon, just one extra after dinner mint ...

It’s amazing how quickly some things get normalised. Only last week at a press conference in Chequers, Donald Trump not only claimed to have no idea who Peter Mandelson was, he also insisted he had ended a major war between Azerbaijan and Albania.
If that wasn’t enough, on his return to the US the president went on to declare he had prevented conflict between Armenia and Cambodia. In a saner world, someone might raise an eyebrow at this. But no longer. Instead, everyone just nods and smiles. This is just The Donald being The Donald. What a guy!
Here in the UK we have our own altered states. For some time now, Reform has been holding a weekly Monday morning press conference. Even when no one has very much to say. Just an opportunity for Nigel Farage to let rip on some of his favourite subjects. Principally, himself. Nige can’t go more than a few days without the excitement of a TV camera recording his life before part of him dies inside. If he is not front and centre of the news channel, he has no sense of purpose. Lost to himself and the outside world. It doesn’t matter what he says, the meaning is in the saying of it. This is just Nige being Nige. What a guy!
This Monday, Nige was to be found in the Royal Horseguards hotel in Westminster. His theme? Legal migration. Shortly to be made not so legal. His five minutes started now. Nige strode towards the lectern – just as the Reform UK panel fell off the front. A good beginning.
Nige looked mildly irritated. He was bored of talking about people crossing the Channel in small boats. Everyone had already got the message that they were evil. Nige now wanted to focus on all those who had come here legally and been granted indefinite leave to remain (ILR). Well, he had news for them. Everyone’s ILR would be revoked. There were just too many foreigners and Nige had never seen one that he didn’t want to deport.
The thing about most legal migrants was that they were just lazy. Spongers. Coming here because they just wanted an easy life. Contributing nothing. Soaking up welfare benefits. And if they were working, they were in low-paid jobs we could probably do without. Like nurses, hospital porters and care workers. They were all part of the Boris wave. The greatest betrayal of Brexit since Nige himself. Nige was never too bothered about contradicting himself.

You see, now it's easy to see why all that G & S, Goons, Hancock training came in handy.

After a cracking Crace, all pond needs to do is glance at the headlines in the Graudian's UK edition and the pond is full informed.

The cracking Crace was at it again today ...No more Mr Nice Guy: Ed Davey rebrands Lib Dems as the real opposition to Reform

These are Happy Days for the Liberal Democrats. A year ago in Bournemouth they had appeared to be caught in the spotlight of their own electoral success. Unsure quite where they would go next. At times the conference speeches had been almost apologetic. New MPs blinking as they were pushed on to the main stage, unknown even to themselves.
Twelve months on there is a confidence to the party. Their 72 MPs have all settled quite comfortably into Westminster and rather enjoy the attention. They are bullish about the future. There are no worries about losing their seats at the next election. Rather they see 2024 as a springboard for a brighter future. Looking to take more seats off the Tories as well as taking chunks out of Labour in the red wall. Branding themselves the real opposition to Reform. A key player in any centre-left coalition.
Whether this confidence is misplaced or not is another matter. Prof John Curtice reckons the Lib Dems have just about maxed out their gains in their current iteration and will need to reinvent themselves in the next few years. But for now the party seems happy enough with the way things are at their annual conference this September. They think things are falling into place. Even down to Donald Trump making a speech to the UN at the same time as Ed Davey was giving his leader’s speech.
Call it synchronicity. Call it luck. Either way, it suited Ed just fine. Over in New York there was the US president unapologetically dismissing the UN. Telling European leaders their countries were going to hell. Making no mention of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Rubbishing green energy and the climate crisis. Declaring London was under sharia law with Sadiq Khan. All music to Davey’s ears. Why interrupt an enemy when he’s telling you who he is? Let Labour and the Conservatives try to explain all this away. They are the ones who have been sucking up to the Sun Bed God.
So, these are also Happy Days for Ed. While Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch can feel the wagons circling, Davey has no immediate rivals for his job. Sure, there are always the odd moans that Ed hasn’t cut through enough but no one is gunning to replace him. Right now, he’s as safe as a leader can be until the other side of an election. The Lib Dems are more or less united behind him. They speak with one voice. For those in search of resentments and disagreements, the last few days in Bournemouth have been a massive disappointment.
And yet Ed’s closing speech somehow all just felt a bit too cosy. Davey may have been working on turning his Mr Nice Guy image into a Mr Not-Quite-So-Nice Guy with his attacks on the BBC for its Reform coverage, but he seemed mostly happy to play his Greatest Hits. To tell the conference what he thought it wanted to hear. Not to challenge it to follow his lead into new directions...

And so on, and that's way more than the pond ever needed to know.

The pond rarely has to look beyond the cracking Crace to keep up with little England, ever since the plucky Englanders shot them in their Brexit big toe.

If the pond needs any supplemental reading, it will always turn to Marina for a good Hydeing on a Wednesday ... Spare a thought for right-royal victim Duchess Fergie – it’s been another truly hellacious week 

Truth to tell, the pond rarely spares a thought for any royal, now or then, but if Marina insists on a marinating, the pond turns to its supply of lemon rind...

Last night I found an incredible archive interview with Jeffrey Epstein, conducted by the New York Times on the eve of his surrendering himself to his 2008 prison sentence. “He said he has taken steps to make sure the same thing never happens again,” the NYT relates. (Spoiler: it happened again.) “For starters, Mr Epstein has hired a full-time male masseur (the man happens to be a former Ultimate Fighting champion). He has also organised what he calls a board of directors of friends to counsel him on his behaviour.”
Dearie me. Maybe that’s what his friend Prince Andrew was doing in the famous photo of them walking in Central Park two years later, bundled up against the New York cold and an approaching tornado of sex-abuse allegations? Although, hang on, because that was the four-day house visit that Andrew said he’d made to break off contact for ever with Epstein. “I took the decision that I had to show leadership,” he boasted to Emily Maitlis, “and I had to go and tell him: that’s it.” As most people wondered of the dim-witted old sleazebucket when that Newsnight interview came out: could you not have done it on the phone instead? But then, of course he couldn’t, because this was not actually the end of contact at all. An email from a few months later has already surfaced, sent from Epstein to what the UK Financial Conduct Authority redact as a “member of the British royal family”, looking to set up a meeting between said royal and the since-disgraced former Barclays boss Jes Staley. The response from the “member of the British royal family” was: “Keep in close touch and we’ll play some more soon!!!” Look, maybe it was Princess Anne.
The trouble with being thick and telling this many lies is that you can never remember which one you’ve told. This is certainly the situation Andrew’s former wife, Duchess Fergie, finds herself in this week, as some of her own emails to Epstein have surfaced, and have promptly detonated her 2011 statement to the Evening Standard that, “I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children and know that this was a gigantic error of judgment on my behalf. I am just so contrite I cannot say.” Fergie promised to “have nothing ever to do with Jeffrey Epstein ever again”. We now discover it was just weeks before she was writing privately to Epstein saying she never said all the things she definitely said.
Charities are dropping her left, right and centre, but what else can they do? “I know you feel hellaciously let down by me from what you were either told or read and I must humbly apologise to you and your heart for that,” Fergie fawns in one email to Epstein. “You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family. As you know, I did not, absolutely not, say the ‘P word’ about you …” Absurd to find her too prim to even type the word “paedophile”, though not to be supreme friends with someone who had literally been to prison for soliciting minors.

And so on, and more links and fun at the original, and that's more than enough of a sampling of that Hydeing, and that's way TMFI about Fergie. 

And so in very quick order, and with just a few serves, the pond is replete, fully informed, or at least knowing all that's needed to know, and as a side-benefit, gorged on a comedy that's been going on since the days that Sullivan cavorted around Europe with the Prince of Wales ...

Of course these reports are in a grand English tradition which stretches way back. 

Don't get the pond started on its addiction to Victorian era magazine Punch.

Did you realise there was a guide to all the Punch that could be found in the archives?

You could spend hour upon hour frolicking through memories of empire, as much or even more fun than romping with Nigel and Fergie, or be constantly reminded of that tragic shooting off of the Brexit toe.

For variation the pond will listen to James O'Brien on YouTube though he too tends to be obsessed with the United States ...

"Trump is a depraved, delinquent menace"

 

 Or on Candace Owens ... "I feel so sorry for this woman I could weep." 

   

The pond understands, it's easier to look at the lunacy in the US than contemplate it at home or elsewhere, but James does do the Brits, with Fergie, taking a break from King Donald to celebrate the toe-sucking wonder, fresh from her marination, ready to star in 'How do you solve a problem like Fergie?'

     

Why would you want to solve Fergie? Perhaps somewhere, someday a nascent comic opera will burst on to the scene, and be way better than Nixon in China, or even The Mikado.

Genuine masochists who haven't downloaded the LBC app can even listen to the whole James show on YouTube, though it might take up two and a half hours of your life. 

 Of late the pond has also been including a few scattered episodes from Simon Marks at the bottom of end of week posts. 

He can be found here.  

His acerbic takes on the American week can be found tidily tucked into a playlist here... 

For years the pond devotedly listened to Alistair Cooke's letter from America - that BBC/ABC combo at work again - and as the pond has wandered down little England colonial memory lane this arvo, here's the end, with a sampling of said Cooke ...

 

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