I was in the pub the other day and I was talking to the bartender. It's normally a great little insight into the whole local scene. One of the pubs near me does haircuts for all the punters on a Saturday afternoon. This works well for the drunks who are having trouble at home. This is presumably because they can get up on a Saturday morning and say "I'm just off to get my hair cut" and when they get home on Sunday morning covered in vomit they will at least have had a haircut.

So I was talking to this bartender and while I might have imagined I was going to get some great insight into the local community and perhaps into the human psyche, we were in fact doing as all British people do in this situation: we were talking about the weather.

What do people do in countries without a temperate climate? How do they open up the conversation to chit chat without the opening gambit: “funny weather we've been having lately”. It's entirely possible that this is why the English are seen as up tight by the rest of the world. We have such a ready made perfect bit of conversational shorthand that we never have to get into any personal issues. The rest of the world have to talk to each other about real things. That is certainly not something we would tolerate over here.

Actually now I think of it perhaps that was the Neo Cons agenda all along? Perhaps they had tired of such political movements as "back to basics" and a return to "family values" and thought that the surest way of dealing with it would be to promote the ability to use the phrase "funny weather we've been having". That's why the US (and the ultra conservative China) have really been pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere. Once climate change really kicks off everyone in the world will be talking about the weather and there won't be time for all that naughty sex.

Anyway.

Because we were talking about the funny weather we've been having the conversation almost immediately turned to the great snow of April 2008. Almost 3 whole inches fell! Fancy! I must have brought it up because she said "Oh yeah, it was terrible. I had to go out and rescue my tortoises who had already come out of hibernation. Like two little slow-moving snowballs they were."

So remember to look after the environment because not only does it upset Neo Cons but it also stops tortoises becoming projectile weapons.

P.S. Sorry it's been such a long time since the last post. I think I'm back now.

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