Titbits

Two titbits of news this morning.

The first from yesterday's Guardian being that Greene King - once a lowly East Anglian brewer with a nice line in bitter (best taken somewhere near Bury St. Edmunds, but quite palatable elsewhere) - has been sold to the Chinese. Another income stream of the future sold off to pay the (current account) debts of the present. How much do we have to sell off before we work out that we have to pull in our collective spending a bit?

I associate to the days when living on the never-never used to be a trait of the working classes.

The second from this morning's collection from Microsoft, gleaned on this occasion from the Daily Mail. It seems that our new lady consort has been refused a visa by the US immigration people because she has visited forbidden places, possibly in company with a forbidden person. Is it just low level incompetence or is it a calculated snub, a reminder to Johnson that he is supposed to grovel and flatter twenty four by seven? And certainly not to behave as if he were any kind of equal. A calculated snub which can be slowly deflated by diplomatically claiming that it really was a bit of low level incompetence. Perhaps Trump is quite good at carefully calibrated insults.

I associate to the days when the king was allowed fairly gross table manners at dinner, but woe betide any courtier who thought he could get away with same. Something I think I read in one of Nobert Elias's books, a chap I would like to find time to read more of. And checking his spelling as I type, I find that he was a native of Breslau, a once German now Polish place I notice from time to time. See reference 1 for a sample from a few years back.

PS: not forgetting that the rather smaller Fullers went to the Japanese a few months back.

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=breslau.