Guardian trivia

I was interested to see read in yesterday's Guardian about McDonald's activities, or rather lack of them, in the county of Rutland. Very careless of them, thinks I, don't they know that Rutland was abolished in the 1974 reorganisation?

Checking, I find that this is not the whole truth, and that there was a fight back, with Rutland now being a unitary authority. But in recognition of its modest size, it has to share its emergency services with Leicestershire and its MP with parts of Leicestershire. On the other hand it has recovered its status with Royal Mail as something called a 'former postal county'. Only in a former department of government.

And then we had a lady wrestler, who out of respect for her faith, appears in the ring in a hijab.

Rather less trivial, the French are going to make the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon pay a fair & proper amount of tax into the French coffers. Good for them. While President Trump thinks that this is an outrage and is tweeting (President-speak for thinking) about putting an extra tax on smelly French cheese.

And lastly, we had the news that our government has seen fit to allocate £120m to a festival, dubbed by some cynic the Festival of Brexit, to be held in 2022. To think that Dame Trace might get her nose in the trough and achieve her long held ambition of getting the work which propelled her to artistic eminence, bed with mixed litter, cast in solid bronze and erected on a plinth of Bermondsey Marble somewhere in the Southbank complex, as befits her standing as a Dame, RA etc.

PS: for the ignorant, Bermondsey Marble is a proprietary product made of a mixture of crushed brick and crushed glass, bound together with a superior, clear plastic resin. The stuff lasts for ever, far longer than the real thing. If you want the best, buy it from Portugal.