It’s the little slights that really hurt. The ones where they just don’t seem to have thought about it. Certainly, we’re all thrilled that the great President Obama has deigned to make a visit to this little island vassal state. But why did he have to bring his own car?
We have cars. Loads of them. And the thing is, Barack, ours even drive on the correct side of the road. Granted, they aren’t all so proficient at, say, withstanding a direct hit from an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) as your multi-ton behemoth (dubbed ‘The Beast’), but you’d be amazed at the number of RPGs we don’t have floating around in the UK. Or assault weapons of any sort, really. It’s probably something to do with the way that we can’t buy them at our local 7-Eleven of a morning, when we pop out to get some milk.
Even so, some of our cars probably could have managed it. You see, we actually have a few quite important people in this country, too. No, don’t laugh. We really do. There’s that lady, what’s she called? Ah yes, the Queen. We managed to stop her from being blown up, like anything. Really. On a daily basis. And that other guy. Chubby, squinty eyes, Scottish. Name escapes me. But I think you met him. Yeah, that’s right. You gave him a DVD boxed set. Which didn’t work. Because the DVD players are different over here. Just like the cars. Has anybody ever told you that? No, probably not. You probably just ship your own DVD players over, too.
It’s not as though you were even paying for the damn car properly, either. At least, I assume you weren’t. I’m having some tense trouble with this column, because I’m writing this before you get here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the US embassy hasn’t reversed its policy of totally not paying the congestion charge at all, for no reason whatsoever.* Well, I say ‘policy’, although ‘policy’ is a bit grand, isn’t it? It’s more a sort of vague, unthinking assumption. A sort of ‘ooh, look, there are some tiny little people, like ants, jumping around down there and waving some quaint little bills around, let’s ignore them completely’.
According to dear Boris the other week, the US Embassy now owes Transport for London almost £3 million in unpaid charges and fines. True, other embassies owe us money, too, such as the Russians (£1.8 million) and the Japanese (£1.77 million), but at least they don’t simultaneously make a big show of shutting down our entire city with big, f***-off, specially imported Cadillacs which do eight miles to the gallon. That’s right, eight. My car does about 50. We notice that sort of thing in Europe. Although you won’t have done. Because you probably shipped over your own petrol, didn’t you? In case ours had a bomb in it.
It’s rude. I know you won’t quite be able to grasp this properly, because you don’t think of us as being proper people in the same way that Americans are proper people, but it really is. It’s not like you’re visiting Afghanistan. It’s not even like you’re visiting Texas. We’re a proper country, with laws and everything. We were offended enough when George W. Bush did this sort of thing, shipping over his own hospital and suchlike, and making sure every British sniper on a rooftop had other snipers next to them, who were all called Chip and came from Wisconsin and had much bigger guns.
But you? You’re the guy who sneered at the car-makers for using private jets to fly to Washington in order to tell Congress how broke they were. And now you’ve come to Europe with a car and a helicopter and an entourage of 500, in order to figure out why the world is running out of money. As if we didn’t have these things in Europe already. You just don’t trust them.
Like I said, it’s rude. And somehow we’ll get back at you. Our leaders will give you gifts that require electrical plugs with three pins, that safely earth. Our diplomats will ensure that all discussions include the words ‘herbal’ and ‘aluminium’, and will pretend not to understand you when you say them wrong. At state banquets, you will be presented with a salt-shaker (with one hole) and a pepper-shaker (with many holes) and left to fend for yourself. Assuming, that is, that you haven’t brought your own salt and pepper along, too. Although you probably have.
*I’m also going out on a limb and assuming that your big scary car wasn’t actually hit by an RPG. If it was, sorry.
Did you see President Medvedev speaking to Andrew Marr last weekend? I kept one eye on it, while browsing the papers, waiting for Medvedev to say something about how much Marr looked like Vladimir Putin. I also wanted Marr to ask him why he wears such very big ties. It’s odd. He always looks like he’s on his way home from a low-ranking job in the City five years ago.
Medvedev called the economy ‘a global problem’. And at that exact moment, I was reading in the foreign pages about Chinese state-sponsored hacking. No such thing, said a Chinese spokesman. Hacking, he said, ‘is a global problem’.
Gordon Brown is fond of global problems, too. So, on a whim, I decided to have a wee search through the world’s news for the past week, to see how many other global problems I could come up with. There were loads. The economy aside, Barack Obama thinks that terrorism emanating from Pakistan is a global problem and Dipu Moni, from Bangladesh, thinks this about her own domestic militancy, too. In New Zealand Aids is a global problem, in Russia tuberculosis is a global problem, and in Newcastle the environment is a global problem.
In Biotech Business Week, ‘the infection of man and animals with parasitic nematodes is recognised as a significant global problem’. In the Philippines, piracy is a global problem. The Australian Wine Research Institute reckons that smoke-tainted grapes are a global problem.
It sounds like the globe has a lot of problems. Or maybe people just like describing things as a ‘global problem’ so that they personally can’t be held accountable. This could be a problem, and not a local one.
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