Doodle

This year’s calendar at work is a strange beast. It’s  from ‘Best of British’ magazine – a publication for nostalgic old men who can’t cope with the fact that it’s no longer 1957. Really it should be subtitled ‘why is everything different from when I was a child – why why why?’. The calendar pictures old toys, which tell you everything you need to know. It also picks out anniversaries which it considers to be of particular importance. Strangely, it chose to major on Britain winning the Eurovision Song Contest in 1967 with a song which Sandie Shaw herself postively hated.

Google actually ignored the anniversary, which was yesterday. It probably wasn’t obscure enough. Google’s style would be more to wait till the 53rd anniversary and then celebrate the man who made the microphones the song was recorded with.

 

Eurovision

smith-pilcher-954-160513Written and drawn in the run-up to both the referendum about whether we stay inside the EU or not, and the completely unrelated Eurovision Song contest.

That’s Boris Johnson on the telly in the last frame, figurehead of the Leave campaign at the time. OK, get your head round this if you can. I’m writing this from the perspective of early July – we’ve voted to leave the EU. Boris joined the Leave campaign, expecting to lose by a slim amount, calculating that he could take over the Prime Minister David Cameron’s job when he resigned, having lost his authority. However, Britain voted to leave, which he didn’t expect. Cue immediate backpedalling during his victory speech. Cameron resigned, Boris announced his candidacy, and then had to throw in the towel when he was stabbed in the back by his ally, Michael Gove, who announced his own candidacy as someone who actually believed in what he was saying. Gove himself is currently floundering, as he’s now established himself as someone who can’t be trusted, having insisted for all of his career that he didn’t want the Primeminister’s job. So now it looks like we’ve got a contest between a third Leave supporter, Andrea Leadsome, who noone had heard of outside of her constituency until a week ago, and Theresa May, a Home Secretary, despised of by the Police force she is supposedly in charge of. Anyway, that’s the story as of July 4th 2016. Expect everything to change again tomorrow.

As for Eurovision, the UK came 24th out of a field of 26 entries into the final. A few of the national juries voted for us, but none of the phone voters in the real world did. Bland doesn’t work, it turns out. Cocking a snook at your powerful neighbours does, though, as Ukraine won with a protest song about the treatment of the minory populations of the Crimea during the Second World War – something that they insited had no parallels with any more recent events between Ukraine and Russia. Russia came third, and Putin had an enormous (but very manly) huff the day afterwards.