Meeting old friends. Name dropping. And pennies finally dropping!

This morning I went for coffee and cake with an old friend. Well, I had cake with my coffee, having deliberately skipped breakfast while my friend, who had had a late breakfast because she is a creature of routing and cannot leave the house if she has not had her breakfast, arrived late and had only an Americano coffee, without milk. We both had orange juice at some point as well.

We used to work together and now meet intermittently to catch up on news. However, since she retired my friend has been travelling to Germany more frequently to see her aged mother (how lucky to have a mother still alive to go and visit when she is now a grandmother herself!), she has been trotting off down south to see her tiny granddaughter (we both feel fortunate to have grandchildren) and, most significant of all, she has been very active with the Labour party. (She gets emails from her MP, from various other worthies and even from her hero Jeremy Corbyn.) Add to that the fact that I also move around quite a lot and consequently it has been rather difficult to arrange to meet.

On several occasions over the last six months we have tried to arrange for a walk around our local beauty spots, selecting routes that her rather arthritic feet can manage. (She tells me her feet are much improved but her back-ache is worse!) Each time we have been foiled by the weather, or something important has come up for one or other of us. But finally we managed today, even though we didn’t do any walking and, as already mentioned, she arrived late!

But we set the world to rights, although we agreed to differ in our opinions of the candidates for leadership of the Labour party.

Because of her regular email contacts, she has developed a tendency to name drop, referring to political figures by their first names, as if they really are old friends. Perhaps they have become that! One of the names she dropped was her MEP, who is of course about to lose her job. But the MEP is more concerned apparently about her staff, who also lose their jobs. And no doubt she is right to be concerned about them. The MEPs will almost all of them fall on their feet but the various assistants and secretaries and the like are in a more difficult situation. The law of unexpected consequences!

Talking of unexpected consequences, I read about a Brexit Party MEP who seems only just to have realised what leaving the EU really means:-

“A Brexit Party MEP has prompted derision after complaining that Britain will have no representation at EU level after it leaves. June Mummery, one of the party's 29 representatives elected to the European Parliament last year, suggested the loss of MEPs would make it hard to hold Brussels to account.
"The big question now is, who will be here to hold these people to account while they still control Britain’s waters, but the UK has no representation?" she tweeted.”

So “taking back control” in the UK means “losing control” in the EU, does it? Well, there’s a surprise!

Maybe someone should have thought of that at an earlier stage in the proceedings!