How to be English, Floral Pees, and Medals of Poverty

Whilst the heavens are currently falling down, what better thing to do than to update you on what's been going on.

So the Bierboerse was on this weekend in Mainz, so Carlitos, Luigi and I headed down there and did our fair share of tasting. A few steak rolls, donuts and sausages later and we're on to the Czech ones.

If it wasn't bad enough that the husbands are pulled along to the garden centres because their wives want to get the latest fashion in plants, but now going to the toilets there is made worse by the fact that they are installing floral urinals. Nothing like mother nature...

Polish migrant workers arriving in Dover are being handed out welcome packs with useful information about how to be English, talk about the weather, not talk about bowel movements when someone asks how you are, and that black tea is not being racist. Maybe one should also distribute these to some of our schools and see if some common sense also gets taught...

In Ghana medals to the value of 1.4 million dollars are being handed out to officials. This is obviously considered better for the country than, say, investing it in shelters or food for the population that lives in poverty. In fact this reminds me of Ethiopia during 1984/5 when Mengistu spent 150 million dollars on tenth anniversary celebrations whilst millions of Ethiopians were starving to death. This tragedy resulted in the Live Aid concerts taking place which raised over a billion dollars, but too late for the thousands of people who already had died. Sometimes people learn from history, sometimes they don't - but we need to learn how to react before it's too late.

Well, back to pulling down the hatches and stopping those storms from coming inside...