On the left. Cats 5 minutes after I get home.
On the right. Cats 5 minutes after Katy gets home.
Month: February 2019
It shouldn’t be this complicated
I went to get letter notarized today. Took 10 minutes, great! Get home, realize that they put my name as Richard Gaston and not Richard Gaston Cote (Gaston is my middle name). So go back to the cabinet. They reprint a sheet, have it signed by big boss. Except that now, the date is wrong. They reprint it again, get it signed by big boss again. Name OK, date OK.
Every time they do this they unstaple and restaple the letter. The front page now looks like Swiss cheese with the number of holes in it.
And I’ll have to go back again tomorrow, because I am a Ms Richard Gaston Cote, and they verified her identity against official documents.
Op-Ed from the Guardian – not mincing words
After a Brussels press conference punctuated with knowing sighs, in which he again made clear the withdrawal agreement was not up for renegotiation but that – as a gesture of goodwill – he was willing to entertain sensible alternative suggestions from the UK government, the EU council’s president concluded with a simple thought. “I’ve been wondering,” he mused, “what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.
This was Donald Tusk unplugged. A politician tired of diplomacy that kept going nowhere – ‘What bit of backstop doesn’t the UK get?’ – and happy for once to speak his mind. “They’ll give you a terrible time in the British press for that,” whispered a delighted Leo Varadkar, the Irish taoiseach. Tusk merely smiled. “Yes, I know. Hahaha.” He no longer cared that much what anyone thought. He had tried to be nice to the Brits but all you got in return was news bulletins with Theresa May in a Spitfire and people comparing the EU’s aims with Hitler.
In any case, his question had been largely rhetorical. That special place in hell was only too familiar; it looks pretty much like where we are now. It wasn’t one reserved only for an incompetent and negligent elite of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Nigel Farage, Theresa May and the rest. Whatever hell they had in mind, they were taking the rest of us with them. Hell wasn’t other people, it was the whole lot of us.
A UK where everything was steadily getting a little worse by the day. One where the only hope left was that things might not get quite as bad as everyone feared. A reality show for self-harmers and the terminally depressed, hosted by Jacob Rees-Mogg. A land of unmanaged decline. The direction of travel was clear. All that remained unanswered was in which circle of hell we were located.
Original link here