12 December 2018 (Wednesday) - Cheese Submarine


One of the advantages of recording my daily life is that I have a record of what I did and when I did it. On Saturday 7 October 2006 I went to a wedding where I necked twenty-one pints of London Pride. The next day I got up and built a fence. Last night I had one (rather iffy) pint of Tribute and a pint of San Miguel and this morning I felt like death warmed up.
As I suffered I watched the last episode of this season of “F is for Family” then turned to the Internet to see what I’d missed overnight. There was the usual political pro-and anti- Brexit stuff being bandied about on social media; neither side seemingly letting verifiable facts get in the way of a good rant. It does bother me that people are *so* quick to re-post any old lies or drivel with no care as to whether or not it is true, or how offensive it might be.

As I drove to work the pundits on the radio were talking about how the chief financial officer of Chinese telecoms giant Huawei has been granted bail. Apparently she's arranged for her company to go against all sorts of sanctions that the USA has put in place against Iran.
They were saying on the radio that the Chinese constitution states that if the Chinese government was to ask  Huawei for access to all the American data, then the firm is legally obliged to hand it over. No one saw that giving all sorts of government-related confidential telecommunication contracts to a Chinese firm was *not* going to keep very much secret…
In the same vein there was also talk about how the American army's secret information is going to be stored in cloud form controlled by servers belonging to various Russian oligarchs.
Does no one think any of this through?

Suddenly there was a "stop press!!"  moment when some breaking news was announced. ​The Conservative Party's officials had received a flurry of letters of no confidence in the Prime Minister this morning. It was announced that there was to be an emergency vote of confidence in her abilities this evening.
Whilst she's doing a rather bad job (quite piss-poor, really), I doubt anyone could do better in the circumstances. And it was rather cowardly of her detractors to wait until she was out of the country before knifing her in the back. Over lunch I read something on Facebook which really sums up Mrs May's predicament.

"Two years ago the Prime Minister resigned because fifty-two per cent of the nation voted that the government should build a submarine out of cheese. Mrs May didn't think that building a submarine out of cheese was a good idea (or even possible), but in order to become Prime Minister she had to pretend it could be done. And to her credit that's what she did. Two years later she presented the nation with a submarine made out of cheese. As cheese submarines go, it was rather nice. Admittedly it was utterly unfit for the purpose for which it was intended. But what do you expect? It was a submarine made out of cheese.

However having built a rather crappy submarine out of cheese she is now faced with all sorts of people claiming that a less crap cheese submarine could have been built. Of course, they are all lying. You can't build a non-crap submarine out of cheese. It can’t be done. But Mrs May can't call anyone out on the matter because she's just spent two years claiming that she *could* make a decent submarine out of cheese.

There are now two obvious questions to be answered. Firstly whatever possessed Mrs. May to think she could build a decent submarine out of cheese in the first place, and secondly who on Earth feels that they or anyone else could now do better."

We had a rather good bit of dinner and a bottle of plonk and had a very enjoyable evening watching “Celebrity Lego Masters” whilst the members of Parliament were voting whether or not to keep on with Mrs. May.
It turned out she lived to fight another day. However her submarine is still made of cheese…


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