99% of the time I love living in the UK and, particularly, living in London. However this weekend the country did three things that have royally pissed me off.
1/ The Weather
It was too damn hot all weekend. I know that most people complain that the UK is too cold and too wet, but I like it like that. Any place where the the temperature consistantly gets higher than 25°C is just too hot.
2/ Sport
We’ve just launched into another pointless summer of sporting patriotism. England played a football match last night and the country (or, at least, the parts that I saw) were covered in St George’s Flags. Even though I wasn’t watching the match I knew when England scored a goal as there were huge cheers from houses all around me. And I’m predicting that England will get knocked out of the European Cup at just the right time for everyone to transfer their patriotic fevour to Tim Henman’s annual dash to the quarter finals at Wimbledon.
3/ UKIP
We just had elections to the European Parliament. And in the UK the third biggest vote (16%) went to the UK Independence Party. A party who’s single policy is to pull the UK out of the EU. At times like this I start to think that there should be an intelligence test before allowing people to vote.
Of course I still can’t think of anywhere where I’d rather live so I’ll just have accept sharing the country with a bunch of morons. See, this is why I can never get patriotic.
Well, we actually won the cricket, but I don’t expect anybody noticed. Either way your complaint about the jingoistic waving of flags was echoed by a scotsman I spent the weekend with. He was very alarmed by what he saw when travelling south of the border. Particularly all the cheap and nasty flags designed to reduce your fuel consumption that are attached to cars. Funny old thing, patriotism.It’s still better than when I was in Bulgaria for the ’94 world cup. You knew they’d scored then because the guns went off in the street…-Dom
Thing is that I’ll bet that most people who voted UKIP couldn’t actually state what any of their Europe-related policies are, let alone their domestic ones. Andy points out at http://www.livejournal.com/users/aoakley/51454.html?thread=260862 that the European elections don’t allow for protest voting, and I wonder how many people failed to understand this.
>> Any place where the the temperature consistantly gets higher than 25°C is just too hot.Hot you say? It’s going to be 41°C here in Phoenix today. Guess you won’t be moving to Arizona anytime soon then :-)
41°C! That’s inhuman. I hope I never go anywhere as hot as that.