When I was younger and travelled more I couldn't help noticing when I arrived somewhere new how many gorgeous women the community contained. But then the longer I was in a place, the less true that seemed to be. I think what was happening that as I got to know a place better the more women were screened out of the equation by my brain and were effectively rendered invisible. Some vanished from my view because they were married or otherwise unavailable. Others were screened out because they were crazy. Or turned out to completely lack a personality. Let's not forget that a lot of good looking women don't think they need a pleasant personality or to exercise their brains because they can get what they want with a bat of their eyelids or wiggle of the hips. Mind you, I still think Norway got Scotland's share of good looking women. No, actually I think Norway's more equitable society means the female population  is not afflicted by the poor health and poverty that stops so many of their Scottish sisters fulfilling their potential in the Looks Department.

Regular readers won't by surprised that when  I lived in the UK I wasn't much of a fan of the Royal Family. What with my odd antipathy to the perpetuation of privilege. And as a newspaper reporter I hated covering Royal Visits. In those days that consisted of interviewing people who had actually exchanged words with a real live Royal. Usually Sad People. But now that I live in Canada I reluctantly have to support the continued presence of the Crown. I still have little time for the dysfunctional family of intellectually stunted inbreds who personify The Crown. But not having a monarch would mean reopening the Canadian constitution and would require the unanimous approval of all the Provinces. Quite frankly few of the provincial government heads could be trusted to run a bath, never mind managing a major change of political constitution. So, as the alternative is undoubtedly worse, Long Live the King. The monarch's representative in Canada is the Governor General, in theory the Queen's choice but in reality a Canadian Government appointment. In 2008 GG Michaelle   Jean agreed to suspended parliament when it looked as though the minority Tory regime  was about to brought down when the opposition briefly reached a rare moment of unanimity. Tory Prime Minister Stephen Harper correctly calculated that by the time parliament reconvened the opposition parties would have fallen out again and his government would survive. But even a hiccup like that is better than fiddling with the Canadian Constitution. Talk about not opening Pandora's Box. Which some of you probably know was not a box at all. 

When I prattle on about English public schoolboys I also mean their Scottish clones. Some are so cloned, that they even speak with English accents. I guess it helps them fit in when they join our rulers. I would hope that few people would dispute that the privately educated are over represented in several job categories such as the civil service and its cousin, the Armed Forces. One answer might be to say if the State is not good enough to educate someone, then it's not good enough to employ them either. But that's not going to happen in my lifetime, what's left it. But here's something quicker. Take the charitable status from the Scottish private schools. Let the parents who want to buy their kids a decent job pay the actual cost. The bursaries which supposedly give normal working class kids a place at these bastions of perpetuated privilege are a sham. The money raised from the private schools when they lose their charitable status could be used to improve the State sector. And perhaps people would get jobs based on their ability rather than parental wealth.

One of the, few, interesting things about The Canadian Football League (think a slight variation on American Football) is that most of the top players are Americans. They are, in fact, rejects from the National Football League who are not good enough to get a game in their own country. Regina has a CFL, team, The Saskatchewan Roughriders. They have a fanatical fan base. And the American imports play up to that by praising Regina and Saskatchewan to the skies in local media. But when I worked in Regina that praise struck me as scripted. I was pretty sure many of the Americans would not be able to find Regina on a map and their professed love for the city was part of their employment contract. I suspected in reality they  lost track of where they where when they boarded the plane in, say, Raleigh, North Carolina. I mentioned to my boss that I thought Regina deserved better. I was told I had no right to express an opinion as I wasn't from Saskatchewan. Luckily for me, the Americans proved my point not long afterwards when they won a major competition and couldn't sign up with NFL teams and get out of Regina quickly enough. 

Hey, what kind of experience is not lived? As with the card game poker, there are "tells" in life.  When people  use of the phrase "lived experience" tells me is that person uttering it is a bit of a waste of space. The same goes for non-Americans using the words "gotten" or "normalcy". What's the point of replacing perfectly acceptable words such as "got" and "normality" with these grotesques? Don't people know that "normalcy" was a word made up by Warren Harding, until recently reckoned to be the stupidest man to ever become president of the United States? Harding was mocked at the time for not knowing there was a word "normality". Recently, I heard a radio presenter lamenting the lack of either, I can't remember which, a fulsome investigation or fulsome explanation. I think, suspect, that she thought the "ful" in fulsome somehow meant "fuller" or more detailed. But I'm getting fed up having to guess what people who should know how to use the language are trying to say.