Sun never sets on nostalgia for the British Empire
There’s a load of dewy-eyed guff being published about the grand British Embassy clearance sale of late.
An embassy discharges specific functions, and is not there to provide exquisite topiary or delicately tonsured lawns for the straw-hats-and-cavalry-twill brigade to gawp at, in my humble opinion. I don’t give a flying one for aesthetic irrelevance, provided this corner of our scepter’d isle does what it is there to do. In any event, the days of statements of global power are over, as far as I am concerned.
Some genteel expats will doubtless cast me as a post-modern Philistine, which is fine by me. It’s the polemicist in me that sees the world as it is, and not how it perhaps should be. Besides, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
Dr Frank
Bangkok
