Despite the fact that most FWers are probably indifferent about the Euro (as I almost am myself), some might enjoy the writing style one of our journalists -- one of the few remaining true practitioners of the English Essay. I'll top and tail an article in today's Daily Telegraph:
<<<< I BET YOU �10 WE DON'T JOIN THE SINGLE CURRENCY Boris Johnson It's been barely a day since the Euro has existed in its tangible form, and already the sight of our European friends is enough to make a man weak with jealousy. They've got it already, the lucky blighters: they've got the lovely luscious Euro, all over the Continent, jetting from the ATM machines in joyous golden arcs. They already have the banknotes, 15 billion of them, warm and crisp as freshly baked bread, complete with their designs of culverts, architraves and other features on non-existent buildings. According to the EU Commission, the European consumer is in the kind of rapture that possesed Danae, when Zeus descended on her in a shower of golden coins. It's here! It's real! Freude, schoner Gotterfunken Tochter aus Elysium.* In the depths of winter, in this bleak New Year, when the mercury sinks, when the frost rimes the roads as thick as snow, when the war on terror seems still unwon, a coin is born to the toiling peoples, and his name is Euro! When you look at the tears of happiness running down the cheeks of Romano Prodi, the EC President, when you behold Wim Duisenberg, Eurobank President, his leathery Dutch face all scrunched with pleasure, do you not feel a stab of envy? Do you not have the same sense of exclusion you remember from your childhood, when someone else got a bicycle for Christmas? Do you wish you could scrap the measly old pound and join in the fun? Do you? If you do, one man who is desperate to hear from you is Tony Blair. This is the moment for which Blair has been waiting, the psychological turning point, the pivot of fate. . . . . Give us a referendum, Blair, you pasty-faced coward. And in the meantime I will wager any reader �10 that Britain will not join the Euro in the next five years. Or the next 10 years, come to that. >>>> *Translation not supplied, and I can't help you either. (Perhaps this sort of serious-cum-humorous writing is an acquired taste. I don't know how this will go down with non-English FWers. A recent survey of humour revealed that English people simply don't understand the favourite Canadian jokes, Australians don't understand English ones, and nobody understands German or Danish or Swiss jokes. As for the Americans, what can I say? I think their humour disappeared, along with Mort Sahl, about 30 years ago. [Or perhaps E. B. White -- his "Death of a pig" is, to my mind, the most perfect essay ever written.] Or, perhaps American humour is still around and they elect jokes instead of telling them. Perhaps the election of Bush as president of the most powerful nation in the whole world was really a subtle joke to show what a farce modern politics really is.) Keith Hudson __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
