I used to enjoy listening to Tony Blair. He had a great way of presenting his facts and making you listen closely to what he was saying. When he spoke, I listened. Whilst somewhat sceptical of the war in Iraq, I listened to the argument that he put before parliament and he won me over. He was a good orator, well rehearsed, often amusing and knew his subject well. Even if you disagreed with him he put his case well and he could make you think. But now, how things have changed. Do you suffer from the 'Gordon Glaze'? The difference between Blair and Brown is amazing. I read an article at the weekend that expressed my feelings excactly. Try as I might, I have never heard the end of a sentence that Gordon Brown has spoken. He has the ability to make me start thinking of something else immediately. Alison Pearson in the Mail at the weekend, put it like this:
"our new Prime Minister could not shout 'Fire' in a blazing building. As the flames licked around his brogues, Gordon would rumble Scottishly: The British people expect me to be resolute, and I'm entirely resolute, in setting in place rigorous procedures to combat this conflagration which is burning my trousers, and indeed all communities must be united in mounting a robust defence against fire, a fire that gets to the very heart of my trousers and what it means to be British."
He has no idea how to present his facts in an interesting, amusing or blokey kind of way. He is, at best, exceedingly boring. I don't doubt for a second that he is very bright, works his socks off but purleese save me from this man. There was a time when I would have argued that how you dressed and what your personality was like, counted for nothing, but I was wrong. If you can't listen to a politician without falling asleep then he (or she, for my feminist friends) might just as well not say anything at all. And then you wouldn't be a politician!
And the moral is, never accept an invitation from friends in Belgium. You never know what might be served up. When I was younger I used to eat snails. I particularly remember eating tiny ones in a rich tomato sauce at the orphanage next to my Italian grandmother's place in Foggia, in southern Italy. In sending me to eat with the kids in the orphanage, they were probably trying to tell me something but I never caught on. Anyway, after one trip to Belgium that all changed. I was served the biggest, chewiest, most disgusting snails imaginable, and that was it. Snails were off the menu.
Talking of snails, we've been inundated with the pesky little critters this year. They climb up anything (like the apricot tree), as you can see above, and not just in ones and twos. Nobody seems to know what they're called. I've got a name for them!
"our new Prime Minister could not shout 'Fire' in a blazing building. As the flames licked around his brogues, Gordon would rumble Scottishly: The British people expect me to be resolute, and I'm entirely resolute, in setting in place rigorous procedures to combat this conflagration which is burning my trousers, and indeed all communities must be united in mounting a robust defence against fire, a fire that gets to the very heart of my trousers and what it means to be British."
He has no idea how to present his facts in an interesting, amusing or blokey kind of way. He is, at best, exceedingly boring. I don't doubt for a second that he is very bright, works his socks off but purleese save me from this man. There was a time when I would have argued that how you dressed and what your personality was like, counted for nothing, but I was wrong. If you can't listen to a politician without falling asleep then he (or she, for my feminist friends) might just as well not say anything at all. And then you wouldn't be a politician!
***
And the moral is, never accept an invitation from friends in Belgium. You never know what might be served up. When I was younger I used to eat snails. I particularly remember eating tiny ones in a rich tomato sauce at the orphanage next to my Italian grandmother's place in Foggia, in southern Italy. In sending me to eat with the kids in the orphanage, they were probably trying to tell me something but I never caught on. Anyway, after one trip to Belgium that all changed. I was served the biggest, chewiest, most disgusting snails imaginable, and that was it. Snails were off the menu.
***
Talking of snails, we've been inundated with the pesky little critters this year. They climb up anything (like the apricot tree), as you can see above, and not just in ones and twos. Nobody seems to know what they're called. I've got a name for them!
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