I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clooney...

"Bloody Yanks!!"

The Girl With a One Track Mind is frothing voluably as she slams down her copy of the Rothergavenny and Lower Splott Echo (twinned with the Delft Weltessprechtgescheittschrift since 1987) on the table. Clearly vexed, she shuffles her haunches along the banquette and with all due modesty adjusts the hemline of her Geri Halliwell-style Union Jack minidress. It's no use though - we can all still see her pubes. In fact, it's a wonder that someone as fashion conscious as The Girl doesn't at least give them a trim every now and then. Unless, of course, the Billy Connolly look is back in this summer, I suppose...

"Why so, Abs?" I murmur, looking up at her from my copy of Llandudno Lite just as Abbie''s in the process of examining what is either a very nasty bruise or else an exceptionally hard to shift marmite stain on her left breast. I hurry back to my paper and put the finishing touches to the speech bubble I've been adding to a photograph of Alan Duncan. "I'm a useless, arrogant Tory fuckwit" exclaims the disgraced Conservative MP. The legend continues in, if I say so myself, exemplary Rubber Soul lettering: "get used to it!!" That's him told.

"I mean, the flaming cheek of it..." Whatever it is, Abbie's evidently extremely riled. She's barely even looked up at the re-run of E.R. she insisted was put on the pub's flat screen, causing no little ill-feeling among the majority of Cow & Snuffers regulars who'd expressed a preference to monitor the progress of the 11.45 at Lingfield on Ceefax. "I mean, if it weren't for us Brits, they'd still be suffering under the yolk of Nazim..." she says with all the clarity and certainly of someone with absoloutely no grasp of historical reality whatsoever. "...And now, just because they've *finally* elected someone *vaguely* swarthy, they think they *own* the place. Racists!!"

"I believe Abbie is referring to recent media reports in the US which have heaped derision and scorn upon our beloved National Health Service", Stray Photon translates sagely. He's a health professional, so he should know. This probably also explains why the wards are so unhygienic. "'Tis true that certain political elements within the British Conservative Party have conspired with the right wing news media and other American forces of reaction to present a hideously distorted and self-serving portarait of the jewel in the crown of our Welfare State; Nye Bevan's magnificent monument to the solidarity of the working people of these shores; that marvellous miracle of visionary modern socialism; a beacon of progress seen and admired around the world and still the envy of all nations today, regardless of race, creed or colour..." He's stood on the table now, fist raised in right-angled, 'power to the people' salute. To hear him go on like this, you'd never know he delivered leaflets for the Natural Law Party at the last election.

"Well, I just wish they'd go back to shooting one another and leave the long-term care of the sick and the elderly to a nation that knows how to spell words with a 'u' in them..." And with that she's off - gazing up at the screen, enraptured by George Clooney, delicate globs of drool forming at the corners of her mouth as she dreamily twirls a long wiry hair around her index finger.

xxx
Mort