FANS of the BBC’s Cornwall: This Fishing Life will know that mostly, it features disgruntled locals moaning about tourists and people who buy second homes in the area.
In one episode, I was particularly amused by a gnarled old chap who said that people from London come down and buy the fish he catches, fresh from his boat.
“And how does that help me?”, he asked. Er, I should imagine quite a lot.
But anyway, you can only begin to imagine how cross these people were to find that the leaders of the world’s seven richest democracies had arrived to pump even more money into the local economy.
One, an elderly gentleman from Washington, had brought with him a team of 400 security people, all of whom would need to be fed and watered.
And how did this go down with business owners? Badly, it seems, with many queuing up to criticise Boris Johnson for arriving on a plane.
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Naturally, the BBC was quick to pick up this baton and run with it, saying that by using an Airbus A321, he’d produced more global warming than a medium sized war.
Which makes me wonder. If he hadn’t flown to Cornwall, how would he have got there? On a train? Ha. That would have put the Prime Minister of Great Britain out of circulation, in the middle of a pandemic, for five hours.
Assuming of course that it didn’t break down in Reading. Which it almost certainly would have done.
So what about a bicycle? Or a horse? Or an electric car? Hmmm. It’s 300 miles from Downing Street to the hotel which means he would have had to stop en route to charge up the batteries. So he’d arrive at the summit just in time to hear the closing speeches.
The elderly gentleman from Washington was also criticised because his plane was so enormous, £8million had to be spent elongating the runway at nearby Newquay airport.
I see, so what we are saying here is that the leader of the free world should be forced to arrive in James May’s Cessna.
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The fact is that right now, people all over the world, who are fed up with being stuck at home, are looking at pictures of that beach in Cornwall and thinking “That looks like a nice place to go on holiday”. And it is. I was conceived on it.
The G7 leaders may not achieve very much — they rarely do — but the summit itself will put Cornwall on the global map, which is good for jobs, good for business and good for everyone.
We’re a Brit more polite
IT must be awkward for the leaders of the G7 nations because before they can actually get cracking with whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing, they all have to get things off their chest.
Boris had to tell Joe Biden the woman who knocked a British kid off his motorbike while driving on the wrong side of the road should stop hiding behind diplomatic immunity and face trial in the UK.
And Biden had to tell Boris to sort Ireland out. So after referring to the Royal Air Force as the “RFA”, he picked himself up from his latest tumble and launched into a blistering attack, saying: “Bzturixxtich tischinistioappy er cuswioly.”
Emmanuel Macron of France, meanwhile, had to open up with a salvo on all that he hates about Britain. Which is everything.
Can you imagine if we did this? Started every party by going round the room telling everyone exactly what we thought of them?
I’m not sure the atmosphere afterwards would be all that convivial.
A sign of the chimes
FOLLOWING just one complaint about noise and the “mental health consequences”, the bells in a Devon church have been silenced.
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Good. I hate church bells and fail to see why a handful of campan-ologists have the right to wake everyone from their hangovers at crikey o’clock on a Sunday morning.
They always say it’s a “tradition” but so is burning people who we think might be witches. And that isn’t allowed any more.
It’s not a tradition anyway. It’s just a racket, as unpleasant as the drone of a light aircraft or the two-stroke horror of a neighbour’s strimmer.
And please don’t play the religious card because if you do, I shall retort with this: How would the villagers feel if someone built a mosque and there was a call to prayer through the loudspeakers at sunrise every day?
My case rests.
Dog and moan
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THE beer company Brewdog is under fire, with staff complaining that there’s an unhealthy atmosphere in the workplace, full of misogyny and fear.
The company’s founder, James Watt, has been forced to apologise and say that in future he will listen, learn and act.
I wouldn’t bother, mate. It’d be much easier to employ only the over-45s because that way you get people who understand what a day’s work means and why it shouldn’t be spent worrying about why there are no lavatories for ladies who have penises.
A real endorsement
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GREAT news – my new farming show has received a one-star review from the Guardian.
This means you’ll almost certainly enjoy it.
Naked truth about boobs
AN angry eco woman who staged a topless protest outside the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral was fined £150 this week.
The magistrate said: “There were crowds there. Families. Children. People would have found it wholly offensive, what you did.”
I’m not so sure they would, though, because on the same day, we read a report suggesting that just about every single child over the age of 11 has been sent pornographic images by their mates.
And that among school kids, kissing is now considered to be “third base”, after they’ve done everything else. So I really don’t think any of them would have found the eco lady’s breasts to be “offensive”.
I do hope, however, that the £34 she was made to pay as a “victim surcharge” was actually sent to the victim. Which, on this occasion, was poor old Mrs Queen.
A great Time
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LIKE everyone else, I was mesmerised by the performances from Sean Bean, and Stephen Graham in the nicely paced BBC prison drama Time.
But also, like everyone else, I was annoyed to see the prison was full of fundamentally good people who shouldn’t really have been there.
It was like watching a prison reformation society recruitment video. And I couldn’t help thinking how much better the BBC would be if, just for once, it could drop its touchy feely, leftist agenda.
So we all have a chance to breathe.
Looks like it will probably be sheer Hel until Freedom Day
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I’M not entirely sure what I’ll be able to do after the so-called Freedom Day on June 21 that I’m not doing now.
Which is mostly staring at that photograph of Helena Christensen getting out of a swimming pool.
It’s coming home
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THE problem we have in this country is that, for some reason, we always expect England to win football tournaments.
Which means we’ve all lived in a state of constant disappointment for 45 years.
We need to adopt a different attitude where we expect to lose. That way we are not upset when we do. Which we will.
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