By the way was just a short column and usually included several totally bizarre commentaries, often just a sentence or two, about current events that Morton turned to humour, some of it very funny indeed. A regular section for example, was Printer’s Frolics, containing misprints sent in by readers.
One I recall was an item in some hapless local newspaper saying a certain road had been blocked by thick ‘frog.’ He added his own comment as usual, saying that the frog was so thick it didn’t even realise it was blocking the road! It was that sort of stuff,
Another item which recently came back to mind, also involving fog, was when the motorways were still relatively new. Morton claimed, in response to plans being announced for fog warning lights to be put on overhead gantries above motorways, that discussions were also taking place at the department of transport to install loudspeakers at regular intervals.
These, he claimed, would broadcast spoken messages to passing motorists driving at high speed advising them they were in dense fog. At the time I found the idea of telling people something that should have been blindingly obvious very funny. I assume Morton along with many other readers also found it hilarious. Over the years however, the idea has become less so.
With Brexit, it has ceased to be funny at all.
It was funny precisely because nobody at the time ever imagined you would need to explain the obvious. But now you can, and quite easily. The impact of leaving the EU is being seen daily in the exodus of businesses and people to the EU, the transfer of billions of pounds in bank assets and the closing down of entire industries, not to mention the rise in violence in Northern Ireland. And yet even with loudspeakers in the form of numerous media outlets blaring out the message, it doesn't seem to get through.
When I began this blog in 2017 I naively thought it was just a matter of time before leave voters realised they had been duped. But here we are, five years on, Brexit has happened and virtually everything that was forecast has either come true or is well on the way to it. Britain is becoming poorer, weaker and more isolated yet forty per cent of the electorate still think it was the right thing to do!
What tyranny do they think we have escaped from?
Defenders of leaving the EU have seized om the covid vaccination programme, citing Britain's rapid roll out as evidence that Brexit was the right decision. But an item in The Telegraph (The Telegraph!) last Saturday suggests even that may not be true. Whisper it quietly: Europe's vaccination programme is taking off - and could catch the UK. was the headline and the article says:
"Following a debut marred by delays and a dearth of supplies, the EU’s vaccination drive is finally gathering pace, leading some even to suggest - chief among them President Emmanuel Macron himself - that it could catch up with Britain “in the coming weeks”.
“With all the shots rolling in, it’s even no longer unthinkable that the EU will finish vaccinating its entire adult population ahead of the UK,” claimed Joshua Livestro, member of the Committee on European Integration of the Advisory Council on International Affairs of the Dutch Foreign Ministry.
"While the UK is likely to finish its vaccination marathon crawling on all fours, the EU will be sprinting toward the tape.”
And the article seems to have a lot of evidence to back up what many might see as a laughable claim.
Ursula von der Leyen announced this week that the EU states have administered 100m doses, “a milestone we can be proud of!” she said and more than a quarter were second shots, meaning over 27m Europeans are fully vaccinated.
She confirmed the bloc would receive 250m doses of Pfizer doses in the second quarter - some 50m more than expected and negotiations have begun for a contract of 1.8bn doses over 2021-2023 with all production and raw materials being based on the continent.
Some countries are bounding ahead with jabs. In the Netherlands, the number of daily doses per 100 people shot above the UK rate of 0.64 to reach 0.77 on April 11. With 4m doses administered, the country has now given 21.6 per cent of the adult population a first dose, with 6.1 per cent of the population fully vaccinated.
Even France has reached and passed some positive milestones. It is consistently hitting more than 450,000 vaccinations a day after opening the first of 40 mass vaccine centres across the country last week, including at the Stade de France, the national stadium. On Friday, it surpassed 12 million first doses - two million higher than its mid-April target - and is easily on track to reach 20 million by mid-May and 30 million the following month.
That would be a turn up wouldn't it?
John Morton, in his old Beachcomber columns always used to refer to Concord as the Anglo French Discord and perhaps that said something at the time about Britain's relationship with France and who knows, it may say something about it in the future, although I sincerely hope not. I worked for a French company for about 12 years and I always enjoyed visiting, they are warm, engaging, clever and fantastique people.
Finally, to end on a humorous note and to give Beachcomber his due, I quote a couple of items without shame from a website dedicated to his work.
Decorative rather than useful
"The ingenuity of Christmas gifts has inspired Dr Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht. He has invented the perfect gift for anyone who knows what he doesn't want. It is described in an advertisement as an oblong wooden peg which props up a built-in sieve. The angle of the sieve makes it possible to sift things sideways, so that what falls through goes into a bucket clamped vertically to the wall."
And you'll like this one.
Anthology of Huntingdonshire Cabmen
"It can hardly be claimed for the newly published Anthology of Huntingdonshire Cabmen that it is, in the words of an over-enthusiastic critic, 'a masterpiece of imaginative literature'. The Anthology consists of the more striking names (with initials) from each of the three volumes. It is a factual and unemphatic work, and the compiler has skinned the cream from the lists. Here are such old favourites as Whackfast, E.W., Fodge, S., and Nurthers, P.L. The index is accurate, and the introduction by Cabman Skinner is brief and workmanlike."
Spike Milligan used to have somebody walk on stage to silence and, from a lectern, simply read out these sometimes very odd names, slowly and carefully, looking up at the audience occasionally before walking off, again to silence.
It always made me laugh anyway.
