If you want a recommendation about something, always choose an expert in the field, not just some idiot off the street - apologies for underlining this message (literally !!!!), but it isn't exactly rocket science now is it, you've got to admit!
Although having said that, sometimes the so-called "experts" let us down, don't they - there's a good example in this morning's Onion News, if you care to just take 5 minutes to go and retrieve it out of the trash and scrape off all the used tea-leaves, that is (!).
But we've all been there, haven't we. Revered by our friends and family as a so-called "expert" in some "niche" field or other, and then finding ourselves unable to answer a simple question about it when one just pops up out of the blue!
[Get on with it, Colin! - Ed]
I still staunchly stand by the Onion's methods here - if you want somebody to recommend the "best number currently around", ask a mathematician. It's just pretty basic journalistic "smarts", if you ask me. And a lot of Hungarians have been waking up this week to some surprise recommendations from the US, that have been flying around their country, a bit too freely perhaps, to put it mildly!
Hungarians are waking up this week to a strong cup of coffee
and some rather surprising news from the US
Let me put my cards on the table at this point! Here, in deepest darkest, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire, UK, my medium-to-hard-pressed wife Lois and I keep a keen watch on Hungarian opinion, having visited the country several times over the last 30 or so years.
flashback to 2006, and mine and Lois's post-retirement holiday in Europe:
(left) the two of us with our friend "Magyar" Mary, at a café in Szeged, Hungary,
and (right) a delighted Lois being serenaded by a gypsy violinist in our Szeged hotel
And just this week I've received an email from Tünde, my long-time Hungarian penfriend, from which I gather that Hungarians are currently much amused, and also horrified in equal measure, by reports of a new statue that's been unveiled in a park in Washington DC; an "installation" that features one of their own so-called "experts", this time in the field of politics.
Yes, step forward Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán!
the "four unjust men" - Putin, Kim, Bolsonaro and now Hungary's Orbán
You'll have to forbid my inappropriate levity at this point - it's another hot day here in semi-leafy Liphook Hampshire and this afternoon, as per usual, my medium-to-hard-pressed wife Lois and I have retired to bed. There's a change of 'locale', however, because we've discovered that our guest double-bed in one of the bedrooms at the back of the house, which faces east, is much cooler by afternoon, so we're doing it there today.
Phew, what a scorcher!!!!
Weatherpersons have said that it's going to get cooler, but even at 82F today (28C), Liphook is much less "scorchy" than a lot of other places, which is a comfort, and Lois and I feel a whole lot cooler when an email comes in from Steve, our American brother-in-law with attached weather forecast for his neck-of-the-woods.
Meanwhile, in Australia, where our dear daughter Sarah lives, with husband Francis and their 11-year-old twins Lily and Jessica, things are looking much more reasonable, to put it mildly (no pun intended!!!!). Of course it's coming into winter over there.
the house recently bought by our daughter Sarah and husband Francis
a few miles north of Perth, Australia, and only 5 minutes from the Indian Ocean
I feel that the UK's great dominions - Australia, New Zealand and Canada - have been moving closer to us in spirit recently, due to the cold air (and the red-hot tariffs etc!) coming out of the White House in the last few months. Am I right? Or am I right!
I think our relationship with the dominions has always been warm underneath, even if for instance it's sometimes hard to see this when, for example, England is playing cricket against Australia, to give an extreme example!
At the same time, however, the dominions have always been at pains to establish their separate identity from the UK, and there's much evidence of that in the documentary Lois and I watch tonight - the latest episode in the gentle Commonwealth travelogue currently being fronted by actor David Suchet (TV's "Hercule Poirot").
Suchet is recreated the journey across the Commonwealth made by crime writer Agatha Christie and her husband in the early 1920's, trying to boost support for the upcoming British Empire Exhibition arranged to take place in London in 1924.
Yes, Hawaii isn't in the Commonwealth, I realise that! This was just a break for the couple on their journey from New Zealand to Canada, but it was equally fascinating seeing Agatha demonstrate what presenter David Suchet calls her unquenchable love of life itself, when she actually learns to surf, and does it quite well - surfing was something that women weren't supposed to do in the 1920's, and even more recently than that, Lois comments.
What madness!!!
Flashback to 1922: British crime novelist Agatha Christie
learning to surf at Honolulu, Hawaii
On her 1922 visit to Canada, Agatha found that the Canadians were much less enthusiastic than the Australians etc, about setting up a Canada Tent at the forthcoming London Empire Exhibition, being particularly concerned at the time to establish themselves as an independent entity distinct from Britain.
The most significant difference that Suchet notices from Agatha's diary, however, is that, by contrast to Australia and New Zealand, say, where Agatha met, and talked with, many representatives of the indigenous communities there, in her Canada diary-entries there isn't a single mention of Canada's indigenous population.
We hear tonight about the shocking treatment of one of these peoples, the Ktunaxas, whose children were routinely taken from their parents and forced into compulsory boarding schools, in which, from day one, they were allowed to speak only English - despite not knowing a single word of the language when they were first enrolled. And being punished by all sorts of cruel punishments, like being given "the strap", or forced to eat soap, if they were heard speaking their native tongue.
This treatment was all backed up by the full force of the law - Canada's so-called Indian Act, still on the statute books today in 2025, although no longer implemented: the scandal of these schools wasn't revealed till the 1980's, and it took another decade to fully banish discriminatory practices in the country.
Will this do?
[Oh just go to bed! - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzz!!!!!
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