@PRAVDA_KECHB@Green_JohnCoyne@mrjamesmack Civil service is so crap that the only way they could find to keep it working at all was making it increasingly insular & parochial
That Orwell essay about the English language is honestly really, really, really bad. He’s correct in that there’s a problem in stock writing cliches but his whole attitude is about purging English of its impurities for perceived “clarity”
Birmingham by far and away the most interesting city in Britain - the real capital, not London. Its relative decline a much better mirror to the rest of the country than Manchester or Bristol or Edinburgh. The actually existing UK, good and bad and the rest on display almost everywhere you go. Richest place to report on and to have conversations with people. Also has the best botanical gardens (maybe not relevant to the point I’m trying to make). The fact that no one has written a gigantic teeming Tom Wolfe / Dickens style brick called Second City shames British writers, journalists, novelists, publishers.