Chicken & fried green olives at the half-moon hotel
For the last thirty years, it has seemed to me that most of the time a substantial majority of voters in the West have been faced with what one might call The Lesser of two Evils*. I would offer as examples of this:
*Francois Hollande rather than Sarkozy
*Cameron rather than Brown
*Obama rather than Romney
*Tony Abbott rather than Julia Gillard
The choices above were between, respectively, a dull bureaucrat and a self-obsessed midget; a human plumface rather than an inhuman crumble-face; an empty black suit being preferred to a full-on asset stripper; and a trappist bonehead gaining ascendancy over a patronising Welsh robot.
But the same set of mediocre choice applies in so many other areas of life:
*Bundesbank mania vs EU Central Bank fantasy
* BBC Soft Left vs Newscorp Hard Right
* Jay Leno vs Piers Morgan
* Neoliberal vs Socialist
These ‘choices’ in turn could be paraphrased as 1923 v 1984; Bloomsbury v Mussolini; Bumface v Peabrain; and 18th century v 19th century.
So to summarise, the eclectic choices available to us embrace everything from pond-life via Utopian Edwardiana to contemporary criminality. As with cooking, when you boil things down, there is either an intense flavour…or the smell of burning in the nostrils.
As an escape from all this strangulated bollocks, I ventured east and slightly south to Cahors for the weekend – and found reality there in the shape of an historic steak & kidney pie, gallons of Cahors red, local integrated Franglais culture, superb architecture, and the blessed relief of conversation with people whose views are to the Left of mine, but perfectly congruent when it comes to an appreciation of decency.
The Slog 