Huguenot

Fun times

Ah! Not really, just followed the work :) I?m cruising merrily towards 50 now, just got married again! Moos seems really happy. We don?t chat, but exchange FB quips and family photos. I know she?s moving because FB is not as efficient as EDF when downsizing for a move.

I can?t be sure that I?ve got the right person because I can?t remember her username, but if she came to Singers too, she is just moving to Dubai soon!

Haha! Just moving to Guangzhou, and was thinking about times past!

Me, but not always!

Finding you all so well!

Hi guys :) Long time no speak! Southwark have explained that I need to proxy vote to get my vote in - it seems like the postal votes won't be released until 13th June, and the likelihood of that going to get to me and back again before the deadline is low. It's a big ask, with a lot of trust issues, but can one of you help me out on this? PM me?

Crikey - did my post from 7pm get 'moderated' out again??? It wasn't rude or insulting - it was addressing the flaws in the independence arguments. I've kept a copy and run it past a couple of mates here, no one can identify a problem with it. What exactly was wrong with it?

Incidentally, the European Voice describes itself as "essential independent insight into the Brussels beltway" Beltway??? What does that tell you?

Haha KirstyH, quite happy to argue at any level. Just offering a bit of the highland romance in favour of Britishness. There seems to have been a monopoly on romance from the 'Yes' team of late - it won't hurt you to feel a bit of the passion from the British now the referendum is over. Don't be churlish!

Haha, no EP, cannot quote you from twenty years ago! Can only paraphrase a brief exchange and a marvelous mental photo of a prematurely wizened claw shaping your point with total clarity ;-)

Phew, what a relief. It sounds somewhat nasal and priggish in my head when it's put like that. But, well, what a relief. Bloody hell. It's difficult to express the anxiety I felt about this whole destructive episode: "The markers of Britishness for me include empiricism, irony, the ad hoc approach, pluralism, and a critical awareness of its own rich and sometimes appalling history. It?s sceptical, too: it has seen a thing or two and knows nothing lasts. But perhaps what recommends it most is the frail senescence that makes it an undemanding kind of belonging, and unexpectedly fits it for the modern world. The untangling of the institutions ? military, administrative, academic, ambassadorial, commercial, cultural ? that have sustained this identity can?t but be painfully destructive. The past 300 years have not been about nothing." Modern Britishness is so vaporous. So poorly defined. So subject to the energy and visceral emotion of nationalism. So wispy in the face of economic imperative. But so damned important. Twenty years ago I heard El Pibe describe the value of things that lay just beyond your reach - things that could never be defined or seized upon without their very essence slipping between your fingers. It has remained deeply engrained within my psyche. "...a frail senescence..." What powerful words. Everything became petty about this Scottish independence campaign, compared with that frailty. Battered by this oh-so-unsubtle separatist bullshit, bludgeoned by the small mindedness of UKIP, I hope that the intangible and indefinable joy of our national identity isn't lost to the small minded idiots who dance on portacabins.

Same as UKIP - bullshit generally. Half witted at best.

My view is that the SNP have been very adept in migrating 'gut feel' emotional, historical and a sense of 'separate' identity issues into a false sense of rational, futuristic and deterministic ideals. It implies that Scotland would be better off alone. This would be the tragedy.

Haha Maxxi. I'm being pretty brutal with this analysis, it's clearly reductionist.