There always is a special feeling about the last shift, well, certainly for me at any rate. After my last block of shifts I left work at the usual time, 10 pm -I work shifts as you may know- and I fancied something special for a late treat. I wasn’t hungry enough for a donner kebab and my favourite chip shop doesn’t open late so I popped into McDonald’s for my yearly Big Mac and fries. Every time I get a Big Mac it seems to me that it gets smaller and smaller. The Big Mac I bought for my treat seemed smaller than ever and I even debated about getting two. Anyway, I drove quickly home, changed into my scruffy ‘lounge about the house’ gear, poured a small Bacardi into my coke and tucked into my food. Sadly, it was rather lukewarm and didn’t taste much better after a few seconds in the microwave. The fact of the matter is that my Big Mac always seems rather lukewarm and why I go back for one, once or even sometimes twice a year, I really don’t know.
Many years ago, I used to work for a cigarette company and I used to meet with my manager and two team mates every Friday afternoon at McDonald’s in Liverpool, the one right at the end of the M62 motorway. I’d always have a Big Mac and we’d settle back and listen to some sales talk and updates from our boss. Every single time, now I think of it, I used to send my Big Mac back and soon afterwards a new one, fresh and hot would appear. Why oh why they could not serve me a fresh hot one in the first place I will never know.
In France, the concept of fast food is lost on the French and I usually have to wait for at least thirty minutes if I have a Big Mac over in Saumur, my favourite French city. At least though, it is served hot and fresh off the frying pan or hotplate or whatever it is cooked on. Then again, when I’m eating in France, eating at MacDonald’s is not high on my agenda, it’s just sometimes when we have to exit our rented villa early in the morning (I should say at this point that 11am counts as early for me) it’s convenient to stop for a Big Mac, or even the McDonald’s breakfast when we have a long drive ahead.
Anyway, this particular night I settled down to watch the end of a really good film. It was Elizabeth which starred Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth the 1st and it was a wonderful film cataloguing the intrigue and suspense of that long-gone age. No democracy back then, kings and queens won and lost thrones and power through murder and manipulation and Elizabeth was lucky to have by her side her spymaster and security chief Francis Walsingham.
These days our present queen is Elizabeth the 2nd and she is probably a pretty popular monarch. Having said that I have little time for the rest of the royals; they are overpaid, over privileged and over here. Whatever you may think of Donald Trump by comparison he has a right to be where he is, in the Oval office as he has won the only popularity contest that counts in the USA, the election. In a few years’ time, Americans will be able to vote out Trump or if they so desire, vote him in again for another four years. No such luck with the Queen.
The UK Prime Minister is a different kettle of fish though. We, the citizens of the UK don’t vote directly for her, in fact only Conservative MPs had a say in her election as party leader and only the constituents of Maidenhead have a say in her election to the house of commons. Currently, Theresa May has the most MPs at the moment, a very slender majority in fact, but that small majority then makes her the Prime Minister.
If I, by some miracle, ever became Prime Minister, one of my first jobs would be to depose the royals and ship the whole lot of them over to either Ekaterinburg in the former Soviet Union or if Mr Putin were not too willing to oblige, to some east London council estate. One big problem there is that the Queen, like it or not, is the glue that binds the English, Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish together in the United Kingdom and whether a President or Prime Minister could do that remains to be seen.
There was a follow-up film to Elizabeth, it was called Elizabeth the Golden Age and I do wonder what historians will call the present age when they look back to add a new chapter in the history of the British Isles.
As I write this the government suffered the biggest defeat in the House of Commons by any government in UK history when members of parliament rejected Theresa May’s Brexit deal by a huge majority and later only survived a no confidence vote by 19 votes. Personally, I voted to leave the European Union but the big problem is that the majority leave vote only amounted to 52% which really means that the country is pretty much split on the issue. If the vote had been 60 to 70% to leave, I don’t think Brexit would be such a big issue but as we as a country are so divided then it is an issue.
So, what is the answer? Another vote? Suppose the remain voters won that one, would that solve the issue? I doubt it, after all it would be one for the leavers and one for the remainers. We could have a best of 3 vote though, couldn’t we?
The real problem is that when David Cameron resigned, I assumed a pro leave MP would take over at 10 Downing Street, the obvious candidate being Boris Johnson but no, Theresa May won the premiership contest despite being on the remain side, just like David Cameron but wasn’t that why he resigned?
Despite personally being on the leave side I think David Cameron would have been better going back to Brussels and saying, look, my voters are not happy about the EU, we need to take a good look at our membership, perhaps that would have been preferable to the current chaos, after all, the referendum was hardly legally binding as far as I know, it was just a referendum, an indication of the feeling in the country.
The thing is though, why should it be so hard to leave a club like the EU? We have given them notice, we have followed the rules of membership and now they are asking for a multi-million-pound fee to leave.
I wonder what Elizabeth 1st answer would be to that?
Letters from an unknown author! 