Ordinary Gweilo

A couple of funny things I’ve read on Hong Kong blogs recently.

Shaky seems to be inhabiting the world of a Brian Rix farce. It’s the old story about someone who is sleeping somewhere unfamiliar and walks out of the front door rather than into the bathroom, preferably naked. Personally, I preferred it when it was Judy Loe in a hotel (in an ITV drama many years ago) but Shaky’s version is here

The other one also involves Shaky. As mentioned here yesterday, he was making a comparison between the death of the Queen Mother and the death of Ronald Reagan. For some reason, this made Eshin think that she has died recently and he had missed it. To make it worse, he admits that was in the UK in 2002 when she passed away! As I mentioned yesterday, the British newspapers wrote about nothing else for nearly a week.

Still, at least Eshin had the grace to admit he was wrong, unlike some people, and perhaps I should be embarassed to know so much about the British Royal Family. As Fumier remarked, who really cares?

I will admit that it’s not always easy to remember whether some people are still alive or not (and I seem to recall a quiz on Radio One a few years back in which the contestants had to say whether a famous person was dead or alive).

So, thinking about prominent British politicians of a few years ago, I wonder how many people know which ones are dead and which ones are still alive (or, as with the royal family, maybe no-one cares). For example, how may of the following are still alive?

Jeremy Thorpe, Jim Callaghan, Edward Heath, Michael Foot and Denis Healey

The answer is that they are all still alive. Jeremy Thorpe has been seriously ill for a long time, and disappeared from public life many years ago, but he is still alive.