Anna (2019)

If you didn't know that this deliciously eurotrashy movie was un film de Luc Besson, you'd probably guess within the first ten minutes or so. I did. 

It belongs to that evergreen espionage-thriller sub-genre we can refer to as 'The Russian Assassin Babe'. Viewers of Killing Eve will inevitably be drawing some negative comparisons, for Oksana and Anna are like borscht and tears. 

The whole thing resembles a 90's straight-to-VHS escapade, except it has proper thesps like Helen Mirren in it, and it has been set in a version of the 90s that never was, with tech from the latter part of the decade, whilst the USSR is still apparently very much up and running. 

There's an almost farcical scene in a Paris park at the end, which has echoes of the 'EEEEEEVeryone’ moment in Leon, that was at once peak Luc Besson and peak Gary Oldman. 

1066 and all that...

In this instance, there was actually a sort of ‘second referendum’, as many of the defeated Anglo-Saxons set off for Byzantium, where they soon formed the core of the Emperor’s Varangian Guard...and were duly slaughtered once again by Norman invaders.

The analogy doesn't quite capture the lose-lose nature of the current tussle. 

Logjammy

Notice how the artificial deadline, the stated purpose of which was to blackmail our EU partners into a better deal, may now actually be used to blackmail Parliament into accepting it. 

Yet, unless said body has a collective 'ahhh, fuck it' moment on Saturday, Boris's tweak of Theresa's deal  — largely the addition of the word 'great',  spoken with the the sort of enthusiasm his predecesssor could never muster  — is unlikely to be voted through within the existing timeframe. 

Some of Parliament's logjammy characteristics are more fixed than others:

• The DUP (“They’re waiting for us to blink, but we’ve cut our eyelids off”) will not vote for trade arrangements that leave Northern Ireland at what they perceive to be a relative disadvantage
• The SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Lib Dems will not vote for Brexit in any form
• The Labour Party doesn't want to take any noticeable stance before an election they'd rather fight on social justice issues.

In practice Labour's official position may turn out to be an attempt to square the circle by agreeing to the deal on condition of a second referendum. 

It's hard to see how they'd consent to give the Tories their election before the Brexit wave form has collapsed.  But in the background blame game the spotlight this weekend will be shining uncomfortably brightly on Jeremy Corbyn.

Boris is going to have to bring almost all his own rebels back on board while teasing a significant number away from a weakened Corbyn. He may end up with the votes he needs to prevent the second plebiscite, but fall short of getting his deal passed. 

At which point the EU 27 may have a collective "Ahhh, fuck it" moment. 

Keep your kitties indoors...

Puerto San José today, looking like a publicity still for Crawl. 

So, it's actually OUR fault...

Trump’s views on the circumstances of Harry Dunn’s death expressed in a WH press gathering, were depressingly familiar. 

According to POTUS, the boy died because an American driver didn’t realise that she had to drive on the left. The blame therefore lies with apparently aberrant laws in the foreign jurisdiction and so the American driver-killer has no real case to answer. 

Blame the rules, not the behaviour. Dodge the responsibility. Morally, it’s only marginally better than ‘I can’t be tried for my crimes while I am President’. 

150 Today

Central Hating for Kids

Crunch Time

Today may be the day when we discover if Brexit is even theoretically possible. One could characterise the rest of the debate and disagreement over three long years as little more than a fog obscuring the one ineluctable issue. 

Put simply, there can be no customs infrastructure on the border between north and south in Ireland, because of the GFA. 

There could in theory be a line drawn down the middle of the Irish Sea, but this is unlikely to be acceptable to the Unionists in Ulster, who will surely never agree to the territory being treated differently to the rest of the Union. (And nor frankly, should anyone else in it.) 

So here we are; the fundamental choice between two unacceptable alternatives. They were always there, and this is why Cameron had no business promising a YES/NO referendum on EU membership without addressing all the treaty obligations first. 

Legally, the options on the ballot should have been NO/NO. For all the rest of the contentions thrown up by this controversy: sovereignty, immigration, trade and so on are secondary. To some extent irrelevant. The UK needed to look long and hard at its own constitutional arrangements, before it could propose to opt out of the treaties that made it part of a 'United Kingdom' and of the EU 28. 

Right now, given that all sides must know that this problem is not open to solution, especially given the artificial deadline, all they can do in order to at least appear to be trying to resolve it in good faith, is to come up with a fudge whereby the customs infrastructure and the 'invisible' line are shunted somewhere in between the Irish sea and the actual border. In practice that would be almost as unworkable as the original two non-options. 

'No deal', now formally also illegal thanks to the Benn Act, was also no solution.

The only matter that can be properly clarified now is a political-historical one. Who gets the blame for this strategic mistake of epic proportions? (Other than David Cameron of course...)

Arroz

I made this rather scrumptious dish for lunch today, based on a process for pre-softening the rice (with loroco and herbs) that I've only recently picked up, and then mixing in other ingredients — here chipotles, sweetcorn, carrots, longaniza de parilla, courgettes, olives, eggs, cheddar cheese, capers, onions, cream and so on — as the final bit of cooking is done. 

Served with a sauce made from the original liquid, soy, balsamic and apple cider vinegars plus a few dollops of honey. 

"Me next..."

Fractured (2019)

I’m not sure that the elevator pitch for this movie would have convinced me of its eventual merits. 

It’s an all too familiar thriller set-up: man wakes up and either reality is on the blink or he is. Cinema being a wholly visual medium, this kind of first person / third person ambiguity is often difficult to establish credibly and then hold onto until through to final act, particularly when one of the options is that much more far-fetched than the other. 

Fractured takes some of the inevitable liberties, but is generally successful and in many ways a bit of an education in how that little extra bit of quality across the production (acting, direction, score etc.) can make all the difference. 

(I'd add that it helps that as a Brit I tend to find American hospitals particularly scary places!) 

Boom Times

It seems almost a bit far out to recall this now, but as I was growing up my home was shaken, as if by an earthquake accompanied by an ultra-resonant, overhead lightning strike, by SIX terrorist bombs, five times thanks to Irish twats, one Italian. 

The second closest of this unfortunate sextet, at a distance of no more than 200m, were the devices hurled through the windows of this now defunct Belgravia pub by the so-called Balcombe Street Gang on November 30, 1974. 8 people were injured. 

I’d been watching some movie I really shouldn’t have about American colonists resisting pissed-off indigenous people and had seen some rather graphic representations of amputation just minutes before my bed was shunted across the floor by the blast. I was seven and the trauma was lasting. Especially after the September 5, 1975 bombing in the the lobby of the London Hilton, which reinforced the association with detached limbs. (The Moorgate tube crash earlier that year did not help either.) 

The first of the bombs, hurled by an Irish twat called Eddie Butler, consisted of nuts and bolts wrapped around gelignite with tape. Had it penetrated, the results would have been mass casualties - ‘carnage’ - but it bounced back off the windows. This was the BOOOM! that wobbled our house around 10pm. The second bomb, chucked by an another Irish twat named O’Connell, failed to explode. 

The Italian twat’s bomb in 1980 was an incendiary device which did for his nation’s consulate at #38 Eaton Place, located some 50m from my bedroom. Nobody was hurt, but the resulting fire is said to have destroyed documents on 140,00 Italians living in Britain at the time, and later ‘inspired’ architect Zaha Hadid. Overall, less of a kaboom than a spectacular, if disturbing light-show.

In terms of media reportage gruesomeness, the outlier was the bomb that took out a passing squadron of the Household cavalry on July 20, 1982. Our sitting room sash windows were severely rattled, and I can clearly recall the expression of the window cleaner suspended behind them at the time. 

Yet, of all these terrorist outrages, the one that instilled the greatest sense of immediate panic was the Harrods car bombing of November 17, 1983. The instant of combustion coincided with my shutting a kitchen cabinet but, as I turned and watched the black smoke rising out of the window, I was acutely aware that my mother was at that moment very close to the explosion, at a location in West Halkin Street. I also later learned that my girlfriend at the time had been emerging from the exit of nearby Knightsbridge tube station, only yards away from the vehicle. 

The bombing of The Walton's restaurant on November 18, 1975 was also ’close to home’ as the device, again thrown through a window, landed underneath the table where some friends of my parents were dining, killing two of them. Another, luckier, woman who been with the same group was left with shrapnel all over her lower body and I later remember watching her in a swimming pool in Spain doing what seemed to me at the time to be strange underwater exercises in order to restore movement in her legs.

On February 9, 1996 another Irish twat device was detonated in the Docklands, a few hundred metres from our flat there, but fortunately we weren’t in it at the time, and then on 7/7, 2005 I was 1.5 stops away from the suicide bomber at Aldgate East. I do however think that people tend to get a bit over-heated these days about the relative danger posed by Islamotwats.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

Back in the 80s I twice dated girls hailing from upstate New York, from beyond the confines of Gotham. Along the way I learned the relative importance in their culture of urban myths and campfire tales. 

One of them told me a scary story — in the midst of a dark, thundery night while we were travelling in France — about a babysitter and her spine-chilling fate, giving the impression that she had heard it first hand from a friend, and only several years later did I realise that this had been the plot of a fairly missable movie. 

Young Americans of our generation are likely to have grown up with Alvin Schwartz's illustrated children's books of the same name as this new movie, though rather like Dr Pepper, they were not such a big deal back in Blighty at the time. 

Guillermo del Toro, also a Generation Xer, has had a big hand here in amalgamating a set of Schwartz's stories into a sort of compound plot (not entirely convincingly) for a modern YA audience. 

Period horror has become a thing, largely one supposes as a way to dodge the dilemmas of cellphones and digital communications. Here the action has been thrown back to 1968, just before Nixon's election, with Vietnam the metaphorical monster under the bed. It's been done quite well, yet somehow adds to the sense of aimlessness about the production. 

Anyway, André Øvredal's film is broadly entertaining, yet also possibly a bit too gruesome for the age-group it is ostensibly targeted at, whilst being neither scary nor coherent enough for us older folk. 

Yip Yap

The Index

In my third year at Prep School our form-master Mr Johnstone laid down a system via which we would record, in a not entirely voluntary manner, every book we read in his centralised notebook, where he would duly score them 1-5. 

It was a fairly simple system. Dickens earned you five points - maximum wholesomeness - a Doctor Who novel by Terence Dicks would barely scrape you one. 

Until fairly recently I took this initiative at face value. Mr J wanted to incentivise us to improve our reading habits. But then I read the first part of Norman Sherry’s biography of Graham Greene set in the recognisable world of a minor public school in the opening decades of the last century. (Greene’s unworldly father was the headmaster at Berkhamsted, and by all accounts a veritable Mr Chips.) 

It now seems that I had naïvely never considered the possibility that the reading league was part of a complex system of observation, control and censorship. Posh schools are part of the deep state. Who knew?

Minding other minds

In the year or so after we sold our company, our flashy new NASDAQ-quoted American owners and, perhaps even more urgently, our more staid primary partner organisation in London wanted us to start recruiting to senior positions from outside the original shareholder base. It seemed that what they had in mind was a set of individuals who waddled and quacked a lot more like traditional ‘communications professionals’.

Most of the founding principals were pioneers, yet more or less amateurs. The field was too new. 

One member of the fresh intake was the walking, talking archetype of what the instigators of this process had in mind. But once I had started to attend meetings with him, in his capacity as our new (and actually first) Director of Client Services, it became clear that much of this talking was emerging out of a one way channel. (Traditional communications are after all, more about the broadcast mode.)

From this experience I have learned just how important empathy can be in any state of negotiation or indeed in the daily workflow. Individuals who are comparatively unable to form accurate impressions of the motivations (or indeed) emotions that underlie words spoken in a commercial context will quickly find themselves at a disadvantage. 

My new colleague appeared to think everyone else had exactly the same picture of the world that he did. In scientific terms, he had no real theory of mind. In the end we had to let him go (though ultimately for reasons more complex than an inability to read people in meetings). 

Being an amateur has its drawbacks, but it is not an intellectual defect. 

The Nobel returns

Congrats to Olga, commiserations again to Haruki! 

Thunder Road (2018)

Is there a word for a spasmodic sort of smile that is at once an existential grimace? The Germans could possibly have one. Middle Americans almost certainly not. And that, in essence is the 'story' here. 

It first appeared as an award-winning short, and now thanks to $190K raised via Kickstarter, we have the feature-length version, which is both a re-imagining of its one astonishing scene, plus an extrapolation from it. 

That opening single-take, common to short and extended versions, finds us in a small-town Texan church, as Officer Jim Arnaud prepares to deliver the eulogy at his mother's funeral, a moment of introspective grief that is to mark the beginning of a proper meltdown, adding marriage, career and parenting to the mix.

The end credits start with the reminder that Thunder Road was 'written, directed and performed' by Jim Cummings. The element of performance here is unequivocal. In a number of scenes where all we have in shot is a single speaking character, one feels that they are alone even when one knows that they are not, and I cannot recall another recent release where the presence of the camera is felt quite so acutely. 

Cummings has cited Alan Partridge and David Brent as inspirations for his over-sensitive, self-obsessed and hazardously un-self-unaware cop. I also thought about Fleabag, though Phoebe Waller-Bridge's character, which originated as a stand-up one woman show, has acquired a bit more surrounding narrative structure since. 

This is a very good, low budget film and I'd recommend it, yet it is far from flawless. In particular I had trouble seeing around this set of vignettes to a viable version of Arnaud, outside of his immediate crisis.

In The Tall Grass (2019)

Probably the best of the Netflix original horror movies we've taken in, certainly out of the high concept ones. 

The concept here, based on a novella by Stephen King and Joe Hill, might actually be said to be tall rather than high, and the film is at its best at the level of its visual imagery and the conceit of a cryptically clinging section of prairie in Kansas with a mysterious, malevolent boulder smack in the middle of it. 

Yet when the screenplay tries to build on this, one is left just a little under-satisfied. Is this a very clever idea that has been dumbed down a bit for mass appeal, or an essentially half-baked one that has a character tossing out the name of a famous Borges short story in order to appear higher of brow? 

We have some of this very species of tall grass in our front yard, though possibly not in sufficient quantity yet to tell if it has any of the same warping effects on time and space! 

Into the Jumble

...has returned for a fourth season, and I have that familiar sense of mild panic as I cast my mind back to the last few episodes and realise that I am not sure that I really know where we are with this story, if I ever did. 

Sometimes I think they should have named it Farrago, with the extra R to avoid any confusion — at least as far as the name goes. 

Day Eight..?

This one is possibly a bit of a cheat, not least because the cover challenge was clearly supposed to be limited to seven titles. 

I did want to include Thomas Nagel's rather contrarian book as one I 'love', yet concluded that doing so might be a little presumptuous as I haven't quite finished it. 

And who knows, he might be prone to disappointing endings, rather like Stephen King. 

COVER CHALLENGE: Day Seven

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

Cosas...

Doors to manual and cross-check...

Some professions appear to incorporate slightly recondite, behind-closed-doors, on-the-job training regimes. 

I have always suspected that there is a hush hush facility somewhere in the UK where all future British Airways pilots are dispatched in order to learn how to speak in that way. 

There are probably signs outside to give would-be snoopers the impression that the only things one might encounter inside would be top-of-the-range flight simulators. 

My mother, a onetime Miss Bournemouth and later a catwalk model, had to learn how to walk in a very precise manner. Again, I have always suspected that similar deportment classes might have been made available to a recognisable sub-genus of little old ladies in Antigua, all of whom negotiate the roads outside with a sort of lilting waddle, their centre of gravity, already fairly low, shifting downwards to alternate knees with each step taken. 

Yet perhaps they have acquired this gait as an unconscious response to the cobbles. 

Parasite (2019)

Winner of the Palme d'Or in Cannes this year, Parasite is a reminder that Korean cinema at its best is near unbeatable. 

We are introduced to a family of JAMs in Seoul, of whose guileful, opportunistic approach to employment we quickly become aware, as each one separately acquires a position within the the Gangnam household of a wealthy businessman. (The appointment of mum and dad in particular requiring an element of displacement.) 

That they have to pretend not to know each other adds some farce to the social satire innate in this situation. Soon enough black comedy is the dominant mood, to the point of actual horror, yet at the end it is hard not to feel rather deeply moved. Masterful. 

COVER CHALLENGE: Day Six

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

COVER CHALLENGE: Day Five

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

The Art of Self-Defense (2019)

Peak Jesse Eisenberg, I thought. Quirky, indie comedy for the Sundance set, I further concluded, not having read up on any reviews. 

In auto-pilot mode for the first twenty minutes or so, we'd not even fully clocked that it was a period piece seemingly set in the early 90s.

And then we started to sit up straight, caught almost completely unawares, as Riley Stearns takes this tale of a timid accountant drawn into to the increasingly sinister microcosm of his local karate dojo in carefully calibrated stages from yellow right through to darkest black. 

Like the students of disarmingly malignant 'Sensei', his movie punches hard with its feet. 

New Assimilations

Crikey, look what they do to the poor freshers now at Girton — matching tees like some sort of expeditionary force of itinerant bible-bashers from Oklahoma.

Mientras más consume, más ahorra...

COVER CHALLENGE: Day Four

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

Piedra del Peñol

Ascended that staircase in May last year. The view from the top at least is to be recommended.

This is just a little bit how I was made to feel recently when I returned home having neglected to purchase one item! 

Septemberfest

One has to wonder just how many years this event has to take place here before someone points out that Oktoberfest is supposed to occur in September. 

It's a bit like eating mince pies in the middle of January (not that I have never done that). 

Maybe they already know, but have just decided not to confuse all the stupid people. 

COVER CHALLENGE: Day Three

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

Crawl (2019)

This film could easily have been the trigger that prompted Donald Trump to moot the idea of establishing a 'moot' (sic) packed with ravenous reptiles along the southern border of the USA. 

Crawl might not deter would-be migrants, but one suspects it could make a few people put their Florida retirement plans on hold.

I've spent a fair bit of time in the sunshine state, indeed I've taken the road trip across its midriff on I-75 from Palm Beach to Naples, across what is known to locals as Alligator Alley. Until now I didn't have the impression that these creatures were quite the head-chomping megafauna presented here by director Alexandre Aja (he of Piranha 3D.) 

We went in at least semi-blind, both thinking this was a film where the primary source of hazard would be a Category 5 hurricane, so when the first giant gator makes its precipitous entrance, we were suitably aghast, though the best jump scare is actually delivered just prior to that by a falling tree.  

Polemics

I read this rather drole, self-congratulatory diary entry from Richard Dawkins this morning > "As I sign the books, I never tire of hearing, over and over: The Selfish Gene is the reason I went to university to study science.’ ‘You cured me of religion.’ ‘Because of you I am now an ex-Muslim.’ ‘You changed my life.’"

The Cover Challenge presents some interesting dilemmas, particularly with the non-fiction titles. Can one post the cover of an at least partially controversial text one 'loves' without appearing to wholeheartedly endorse its content?

I recall that David Bowie listed the book below as one of his all time favourites. It's one of mine too. Yet in a sense, it's also, as our PM might say, a load of cobblers. (The man Dawkins referred to as 'our sick joke Prime Minister' in the same entry.)

I'd like to have it in my seven, yet feel I cannot, at least not without comment. I wonder what Bowie thought.

As for The Selfish Gene, it's definitely one of those books that marks a turning point in one's education, though it's somewhat difficult to feel warm and cuddly about, as is its author.

COVER CHALLENGE: Day Two

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

Fast & Furious: Hobbs and Shaw (2019)

These Fast & Furious chapters are a bit like the Ferrero Rocher ads in that, as Ben Elton put it, the proverbial piss has already been taken out of them in their very production. In other words they are sufficiently detached from reality to owe the viewer only the barest nods to real world verisimilitude. You start thinking ‘No, that wouldn’t...’ and then almost inevitably pull up short. 

The original films found their audience by pitching a group of B-list actors from varied ethnic backgrounds as a sort of on-screen action family. Eventually they were joined by two men who had genuine, lasting A-list status in the form of the Rock and the Stathe, so spinning them off this way makes considerable commercial sense. 

The first half (roughly the running time of any normal film) is highly enjoyable, but after that it turns into a series of endings that aren’t. Though the best line in the film does come fairly late on, when Hobbs’s Samoan mother says to him ‘you’re all skin and bones’.

Looks familiar...

How much does this schnauzer look like the late Duchess of Alba? 

COVER CHALLENGE: Day One

I've accepted the challenge for posting the cover of 7 books I love. One a day, no explanation, no review - just the cover.

The Munchies, Top Ten

These, I have decided fairly arbitrarily, are my top ten favourite restaurants in the world.

I have had a bizarrely fortunate, privileged existence which has allowed me the opportunity to stay at some of the world's finest hotels and dine at many of its most celebrated eateries, including a handful with Michelin stars. Yet none of those made the cut for this list, because it is far more personal than an attempt to fanfarronear some sort of objective, solipsistic scale of culinary quality. 

Instead, here are the places I would simply run to if ever I were to find myself once more in one of the relevant locations. There are memories to be satiated. 

There are ten of them, but there is no particular order. 

Pétrelle, Paris (France)
My wife and I got into the habit of avoiding Paris in the noughties. We'd circumnavigate it, stay in Rouen or Orléans and breathe a sigh of relief. But then in the early part of this decade I discovered the Eurostar out of St Pancras. In three hours I could be at the Gare du Nord and shortly afterwards at the Anvers metro stop, just a short walk away from Petrelle, which is everything one could ask of a small restaurant in this lovely, if occasionally abrasive city. It seems it may be closed for refurbishment right now, which is a pity because shamboliic kitschiness is its very essence. 

The African Queen, Beaulieu (France)
A permanent reminder of a movie I have always meant to watch. An absolute favourite through choldhood, adolescence and early adulthood. My mother could make me smile just by mentioning it. There's always something special about eating in a small port. 

Sylvain, New Orleans (USA)
This is such a good city in which to eat and drink, but this bistro is the place that most caught my attention. Set in a seventeenth century carriage house in the French Quarter, Sylvain sits on the funky gastropub end of the serious eating scale. 

El Bar Liguria, Santiago (Chile)
I've made three trips to Chile in the last few years and I'm starting to think of Santiago as my favourite destination in South America. Liguria might even be the place I'd choose to teleport to right now over all other contenders. It was the first location I settled at in SCL — a meeting place suggested by a Guatemalan entrepreneur who'd spent some time in the city — and I can't quite pinpoint now what the enduring appeal has been, other than the fact that it resembles in many ways a joint that I frequented in London in my youth called Wheelers in St James's. Sitting at the bar and interacting with the eccentric types who served the food and wine was always a key part of the experience.

El Yantar de Baco, Cenes de la Vega (Spain)
Back in the early noughties we criss-crossed the Iberian peninsula in our car on multiple occasions, trips that almost inevitably involved many fine meals, often surrounded by highly-animated families with children close to midnight. Yet the one that sticks in the memory took place in this packed little bar-restaurant with its sawdust-covered floors in a small town quite close to Granada.

Umakyu, Tokyo (Japan)
This spot in Shinjuku's Piss Alley encapsulates for me the very essence of Japan. First taken here by V's old friend Satoshi, with whom she studied in London back in 1991, I have returned again and again. The first time Satoshi ordered up horse sashimi, on the grounds that this was possibly the best way to amusingly vex an Englishman. I consumed it without undue protestation and then returned and ordered the same dish on my return, alone, in 2015.  

Kito Kito, Kyoto (Japan)
There are so many places in Japan where one can sit at a long bar and partake of a series of small, exquisitely-prepared dishes. This just happens to be my personal preference. 

Casa Oaxaca, Oaxaca (Mexico)
Said to have been the favourite restaurant of Gabriel García Márquez, this is simply the best place to dine in Mexico's most mole-laden city. 

Mestizo, Santiago (Chile) 
If I didn't live in La Antigua I think I'd probably adopt an essentially pescatorian diet. For a city that's landlocked about an hour and a half by road from the Pacific, the range of fishy options in Santiago is extraordinary, starting with the Mercado Central, and leading all the way up to this, a smart and innovative contemporary seafood restaurant in the swish neighbourhood of Vitacura. 

La Vigie, Monte Carlo Beach (France)
Another childhood favourite that I know my father would probably have cited as his favourite place in the whole world. Set beneath Villa La Vigie, which was first derelict, then Karl Lagerfeld's crib, before becoming a sort of mega-premium airbnb option, this was the place that SBM in Monaco used to blood its its latest generation of potentially lifelong staff. It features the sort of summer buffet for which radical Islamists would trade in their heavenly virgins. These days, according to their Instagram feed, it has been somewhat hipped up, which may or may not be a good thing.

Mobs and Toffs

It could be said that the whole purpose of a Parliament or Congress in a representative democracy is to act as a filtration system to eliminate as best as possible the instincts of the mob. The US Constitution is almost explicit about this and it is surely the principal reason why we no longer hang people in the UK. 

Yet now, we have an executive branch, nested inside our Parliament, which is openly stirring up those mob instincts whilst asserting that ‘the people’ have some sort of moral ascendency over their elected representatives. 

This can’t be healthy. 

Noticias...

Escuchando Babosadas