National Pride, International Chicanery and the Dutch

Marl left me strict instructions for the shopping whilst she's away. We have this Spanish supermarket round the corner from the apartment, and she told me NOT to use it because it's full of Spanish food. She told me that I should only shop at the English shop, about a kilometer away. She said that I should buy the following : Black Pudding (a negro delicacy of the industrial North of England), Haslet (a crushed and boiled meat delicacy of the farmlands of east England), Jellied Eels (a jellied snake delicacy of the south of England) and Welsh Lamb (a delicacy of the west of England). By buying this variation, Marl insists that we will be keeping to the true international spirit of all us expats in Spain...

Speaking of internationalism... what about Eurovision then...! Imagine that little foreign country winning the English Eurovision Song Contest! I didn't even know that Johnny Foreigner was able to watch it. I thought that they may have been able to listen to it on their English-made clockwork radios, but I can't believe that they are actually allowed to enter it. Back in my day before Korea, the Eurovision was always won by the English. It was staged in the village hall at Spalding in Lincolnshire, and broadcast around the neighbourhood by means of Mr Blenkinsop the radio repair-man's unique and thoroughly modern transmission equipment.

Old man Blenkinsop used to rig up this antenna contraption out of a Ford Model 'A' windscreen wiper, a galvanised pail, a broom handle, a bog brush, some urine and a length of that black cloth electrical insulating tape that that they don't make anymore 'cos it never stuck to anything. He would film the contest live using some old ciné-camera his son looted in Dortmund during the war, and by means of the aerial the signal was beamed all the way next door to Mrs Gedney's parlour, where the whole of the town would be crammed-in to wait excitedly for England to be declared the winner.

It's all different nowadays I believe. Apparently last Saturday, about 50 foreign types were allowed into the Albert Hall to watch a dozen or so foreign bands compete for our trophy. I have been told by a Spanish woman who lives in an apartment above the shop where I buy my smokes, that England lost the contest because our song was something to do with some dirty homosexual people queering it up dressed as airline stewards and going on about nuts and sucking things. This is surely filthy disgusting lies!! The Spanish woman obviously doesn't know that English people have a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to queers, pooves, shirt-lifters, bum-bandits, Friends of Dorothy and those who tread the other path! Besides, our English morality will never allow the country to advertise any kind of bottom-teasing antics openly. No! The Spanish woman must be mixing us up with the Dutch...