Perhaps it’s a glaring and personal flaw in my observational skills, but if somebody tried to insult me via a number plate attached to their car, I’m not at all sure I’d notice. I suppose if it was really obvious — ‘HUGO TWAT’ sort of thing — then the synapses would fire, but anything more subtle would pass me by. And I don’t think it’s just me.
Imagine, for example, driving through Scotland in a car with the registration ‘H746 CLN’. How likely is it, do you think, that some super-observant thug would interpret this as a reference to the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and then gather together a posse to beat you up? ‘Come on lads! There’s some English git down there obliquely making an appalling joke about us losing a war!’ And nobody saying, at any point, ‘But I dinnae get it, Davie. Whit’s the H for?’
Wouldn’t happen. Would it? Yet this, pretty much, seems to be the official — and proud — Argentine interpretation of whatever curious disaster befell Jeremy Clarkson and the rest of the Top Gear crew while filming a Christmas special in Tierra del Fuego six weeks ago.
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