| Fox terrier antics
BRITAIN'S brexiteers are giving every impression of being like the fox terrier who, having caught up with the sports car he's been chasing, doesn't know what to do with it.
It seems they don't actually have any exit formula worked out. It turns out to be a much more complicated and potentially hazardous business than they thought, after 43 years of membership of the EU, and as the economy and other economies around the world reel at the implications.
Now there's talk of renegotiating things with the EU, not rushing it. There's talk of a second referendum, once that's been done. Also of an early general election because, with Cameron's resignation, nobody has a mandate for anything.
Meanwhile Iceland – the equivalent in terms of population of Isipingo – has knocked England out of the Euro 2016 football tournament. Is there a portent here? England, shorn of the EU, Scotland and perhaps even Northern Ireland, being in the same league as Iceland and Isipingo?
The Little Englanders need to be careful what it is they wish for.
Hysteria party
NIGEL Farrage, leader of Ukip (United Kingdom Independence Party – the only one with hysteria built into its very name) was predictably obnoxious in his triumphalist speech to the European Parliament (of which, paradoxically, he is a member).
He kept saying June 23 would be a bank holiday in Britain and named "Independence Day".
This, of course, is the title of a science fiction horror movie in which aliens from outer space invade and inflict unmentionable slaughter and destruction
The Little Englanders need to be careful what it is they wish for.
Why us?
WHY should we on the southern tip of Africa be so concerned about Britain and the EU?
In the first place, we're already taking a kicking financially. Economic/financial dislocation is contagious. When Europe gets a cold, we get pneumonia.
The EU is an enormous force in the world for stability, prosperity and democratic values. In ways it's a civilian underpinning of Nato. Should it be weakened?
Britain is the senior member of the Commonwealth, of which we're a member. Some of us are of British extraction, heritage and culture. Others have lived and worked in Britain, imbibing that heritage and culture. Or both.
Such folk don't want to see the Old Country take a leap in the dark, nor see a dismemberment of the United Kingdom, for which they feel such an affinity.
Another explanation. It's like watching an old friend getting a slogan tattooed on his or her arm: "No ragrets!"
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That perfume
YESTERDAY we discussed a perfume developed in England, based on the smells detected by the Philae Lander spacecraft that landed on Comet 67P – also known as Churmyomov-Gerasimenko.
Unfortunately it turns out that the surface of Churmyomov-Gerasimenko smells of a mixture of rotten eggs, cats' widdle and burnt almonds.
However reader Paul Harris disagrees that this limits the perfume's marketability.
"There could be a great market - mothers-in-law. What a splendid present!"
Hmmm. I can see that being doused with the fragrance of rotten eggs, cats' widdle and burnt almonds might improve some mothers-in-law – but surely not all of them. How big is that market really?
Paul Harris is a very brave man.
Tenderness
OVERHEARD in the Street Shelter for the Over-Forties: "Do you know what it means to come home to a man who'll give you a little love, a little affection and a little tenderness? It means you've come home to the wrong house."
Tailpiece
THEY'VE been having words. Now it's no speaks as the couple drive grimly down a country road. They pass a barnyard of mules and pigs.
She: "Relatives of yours?"
He: "Yep. In-laws."
Last word
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
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