The Idler, Thursday, February 21, 2019

We'll

scrape the

mould

AS THE Brexit deadline approaches, are the Brits summoning up The Spirit of the Blitz?

The countdown is becoming alarming. Honda are closing their car manufacturing plant at Swindon, which means the disappearance of more than 3 000 highly skilled jobs – probably 10 000 in the town as a whole when you take into account the supply chain.

Mercedes Benz are making worrisome noises.

The major banks are hightailing it from the City of London for alternate facilities in Europe.

And now the farmers say they haven't a clue as to whether they will still have their markets in Europe after Brexit; nor whether they will still be allowed to use European farmworkers to gather the harvest and tend to the livestock.

Not to mention the Northern Ireland border, to which nobody seems to have any sort of answer and which could lead to a resumption of sectarian violence, or Northern Ireland's withdrawal from the United Kingdom, or both.

All of this is, of course, totally self-inflicted. Yet the Brits are showing signs of summoning up the right spirit for this self-inflicted blitz. It seems they accept that belt-tightening lies ahead.

Prime Minister Theresa May is reported in the London Daily Mail to have addressed her cabinet on the need to avoid food wastage. She apparently gave them some valuable advice.

When she finds mould on a jar of jam, she said, she doesn't throw the jar away, she scrapes off the mould. The jam beneath is perfectly good to eat. (Nobody has denied the report. It's caused quite a stir.).

That's the spirit! We'll fight them on the beaches, we'll fight off the mould on jam!

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic a TV figure has caused another stir by telling viewers he hasn't washed his hands in 10 years.

Fox News host Pete Hegseth said on Fox and Friends – apparently President Donald Trump's favourite programme - that he has not washed his hands for 10 years because "germs are not a real thing".

Germs could not be seen with the naked eye and therefore did not exist, he said.

Will this be reflected in future White House policy on health matters? It's too early to say. But perhaps, in the interests of the Special Relationship (which is under such strain today), Hegseth could be persuaded to cross the Atlantic and add his voice to the "scraping mould off jam" rhetoric, providing useful advice on the avoidance of wasteful expenditure on soap.

Yes, the Spirit of the Blitz will get them through.

 

A COUGAR was spotted perched high in a tree in San Bernadino, California, according to the BBC.

Was it one of these cougars who haunt our rightspots, slightly older women looking for toyboys? Was it poised to spring on its prey from a height?

No, this was the other-type cougar, an actual mountain lion, strayed out of its normal territory. Firefighters rescued it and returned it to the wild after the vets had taken a look and given it the OK.

Phew! Only a mountain lion! The other cougar would have given them real trouble. Yum, yum! Nothing like a toyboy fireman.

 

Tailpiece

PATIENT to dietician: "Help! This diet you've put me on makes me very irritable. Just now I bit somebody's ear off."

"Oh dear. That's a lot of calories."

Last word

What the world needs is more geniuses with humility, there are so few of us left.

Oscar Levant