My Brother's Back

From that there China. He arrived back in the UK late in the evening of Sunday August 29th. Today, Tuesday August 31st is the first chance I've had to speak to him. Apparently he spent a couple of days in Hong Kong before flying on to Shanghai. He took the Mag Lev train from Shanghai airport to the city proper. He spent a few days there before taking the bone shaking train to Beijing. On his journey to China he learnt that they have to re-draw the city map of Shanghai every two weeks and saw the rest of the tourist sh*t.

The most important part of his trip seems to bee that he spent three days in Delhi, India before going to Hong Kong and spent 17 hours in Delhi airport while waiting to fly home at the end of his trip. Whilst in India his group was helped by including a British woman who was born in the UK of Indian parents. Apparently she drinks, smokes, swears and wears trousers. So her acting as translator for the group of five white men she was travelling with was a learning experience for her, her traditional parents and the whole of India.

Tonight's dinner at the pub with my father was also the first time that my brother has been officially informed of the death of the cat that watched us all grow up. Obviously this has made him a little bit sad. It's made me happy though because I've finally figured out that cat in the bin story. If you've not heard this story you should be ashamed of yourselves because it's gone round most of Europe. On Tuesday August 24th the UK's Sun newspaper published stills from a home CCTV system that showed a woman stroking a living cat before cruelly throwing into a bin. The woman in question looked a bit like my mother's government lawyer partner. Her name, Mary Bale was reminiscent of both the 1960's child killer, Mary Bell and a friend of my grandmother, Betty Bale. Most importantly though the cat in question looked a lot like my now defunct feline. Therefore the story was designed to confuse most of Europe and make me all sad that my beloved family pet had been cruelly discarded in a bin rather then recieving the funeral that I had arranged. Sadly the people who concocted the story failed to remember all those human friends that I'd been forced to leave to the grave.

If that sounds all a bit dark then to make it worse I've just watched the last ever episode of "The Bill." This cop show has been of UK TV for a full 26 years and a lot of was filmed right where I grew up in Croydon. In that time I've crashed many a scene, had my name appear in at least two episodes and slapped DCI Burnside on his little bald head more the once. So to see it end is like the ending of an era.