Gunboat Diplomacy

Surprisingly, even the Pistols didn't use such an incendiary phrase in a song. Have racked my meagre brain but cannot align a tune to the theme - just yet. His patrician worthiness, the Third Viscount Palmerston, stood as a stout Englishman, despite his title emanating from beyond The Pale.

One of my favourites must have been one of his, too:

'The time is fast coming when we shall be obliged to strike another blow in China...these half-civilised Governments such as those in China, Portugal and Spanish America, all require a dressing every eight or ten years to keep them in order.'

Just too good to be thrown to the political wolves. Tears roll down my cheeks even as I report the statement.  Sometime in 1850, by they way, so clearly the Government has been playing with my baked-bean cans and string and interfered with my Freedom of Communication.

Anyway, to business: the continuing demise of an education system in this country. Having several children reasonably progressing through the system has alerted me to some youngsters who have not had such good grace. The title phrase sprang to mind as I hitched a ride to one of the new academies proliferating in The Levels, riding shotgun for a neighbour. Our key item on the agenda was that of language tuition, and we had arranged to visit a senior tutor of languages. How I love it when a plan comes together!

Several exchanges later (not school-swaps, just conversational gambits...) we had more information than perhaps we wished. Be careful for what you wish! The sad fact of life is that, despite the on-rushing International Mini Baccalaureate, schools in this country persist in teaching French and German. In a non-political mood, I guess the minority that can strike an X across a page will be the judge of that wisdom over time.

Far more likely, Henry Temple (he of the estate in Sligo and the death in situ, Primus inter pares) will be made to eat his words, posthumously.  The Chinese will run the world in fifty years, and in fifteen years there will be more Hispanic speakers in the US than there are those of English. And our State schools are doing exactly what to prepare our next generation for this?  Continuing to teach them German, with a guttural feel, and French, with an appalling accent and no sense of idiom.  That is, if the poor lambs can get past English.

I hope I used diplomacy rather than the gunboat in our conversation this afternoon, but I really felt like letting loose some cannon.

In an uncharacteristically upbeat ending, I wish to pay thanks to the anonymous benefactor who replaced my favourite Northern single - with a very rare promo copy!  And, I suppose, Declan again, to end the rant with a tune: just for 'over-run by the Chinese line'.  A la prochaine.