Sceptred a'igh'
Britannia has crafted a dazzlingly polite smile of resignation that she flashes to the world, to mask the flat and sour nostalgia served by time and the dust of the family estate. As a young and dynamic country she travelled the world and brought half of it back in her suitcase; her star waxed benevolent and her truths were drunk by nations with the same regularity and application as the cod liver oil that built the character of each generation. The numbing warmth of these memories keeps the chills from her toes as she tries hard to find her place in this home of cultural awareness where her concerned citizens have placed her. Sometimes it can be a confusing experience.

How else do you explain a country whose culinary heritage has plucked leaves from every national cookery book in the world, but where 90% of the food outlets in its capital city sell only sandwiches and coffee?

How else do you defuse the identity confusion of a country that used to have one of the foremost manufacturing and industrial cultures in the world, and then made an almost about-turn to a tertiary economy, before spilling over its borders in the search of cheaper labour and outsourcing its new service sector, leaving behind only those who outsource the outsourced and the custodians who administer and trade in the houses and cars now built by imported foreign labour?

Can any sense be made of a country that, notwithstanding successive shifts from the right wing to the left wing and back again over the past thirty years, has expressed no executive or ideological regret for promoting the dream of individual personal enrichment as a vehicle for consolidating an overweening Benthamite social structure that would cement and exemplify its professed tenets of diversity and opportunity, while at the same time vacuuming the contributions of the gainfully employed into the Charybdis of taxation and pissing them into an endless pit of interlarded middle management?

As Britannia dozes off fitfully in front of the community-sponsored three-bar heater, I see the light soften and shine in her eyes, and travel with her to her globetrotting and saucy youth, where I slip under the bedclothes against her dreaming frame and prod her with my erection, just to hear her shift in her sleep and murmur “Sorry...”.
( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Tue 8 Oct 2013, 14:07, 6 replies)

"We see the world not as it is, but as we are."

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 8 Oct 2013, 14:13, closed)

"We Are the World."

( .Yeti. El amor en los tiempos del cólera, Tue 8 Oct 2013, 14:15, closed)

I'm not.
( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Tue 8 Oct 2013, 14:36, closed)

*hums Jerusalem*
To the dogs bruv, to the fuckin' dogs innit.
( Infidel , shit and wrong, Tue 8 Oct 2013, 14:18, closed)

yeah yeah

(TheManWithThePlan cussed your mum on, Tue 8 Oct 2013, 14:34, closed)

This is an old man's song;
The lean and slippered pantaloon finding that life does not measure up to the extravagant dreams of his youth.
(the other guy not the one that gave you coochie warts, Tue 8 Oct 2013, 15:33, closed)