"Letter from the UK" - "Welshman Living in England" - by Rob Burge (England)

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From the Web 1.0 days I bring you The Forum. To preserve them for posterity as Geocities can no longer be found but also it's fun to re-read some of them.
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23rd February, 2001

(February 2001)
Again, the quality of British foods has come into the international news arena following the recent BSE scare. Foot & Mouth has broken out and all meat products are banned for export. Why this should be defies any logic. The British way of cooking 'Meat Products' consists of either deep frying everything till 'golden-black' or roasting until texture resembles tanned leather! Any opportunities for bacteria to grow are eliminated within the first 2 minutes of incineration. The carbon content of the average Brit is approx 50% with beer and chips making up the rest. Do we eat a healthy diet? Experts are saying that 1 in 4 children are obese with 'Fat Camps' being the favourite holiday location of today's youth. TV at the moment is full of 'fly-on-the-wall' documentaries interviewing 130kg 14 year olds eating fast food relating on how much the 'Fat Camp' has helped them. Yeah, helped them get to the front of the queue more like!

Sport:
Tis the time of year for extensive sport coverage in the UK. European Football (soccer) Championships are in full swing with British teams leading the way with the likes of Leeds, Liverpool, Arsenal and obviously Manchester United representing Britain. The FA Cup (Football Association Cup) is an on-going competition where the small teams have a chance of glory against the 'big-teams' and every year the surprise results delight the neutral fan. The big surprise this year seems to be the behaviour of the British football fan. Their violence abroad has abated and fans from Holland, Italy and especially Greece now lead the league table of worst supporters. Good for Britain but still not good for the game. Sadly, many British fans have been stabbed abroad this season. Finals of the home championships will now take place in Cardiff instead of the famous Wembley Stadium (London), which is to be re-built. So far, the powers that be (consisting of several committees), have drawn up around 5 different plans. The remit for the new stadium was to include a running track in time for the European Athletics Championship in 4 years time. This was dismissed in favour of a stadium complex with hotels & shops!!!! Bizarre. The announced cost of this totalled US$800m. As a comparison, the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff (completed 2 years ago) was US170$m. A revision to the original plans has now been completed reducing the total cost to around US$500m but it still doesn't have any plans for Athletics and completion date is now set for 2006. Wonder why the GB team are so bad at the Olympics? Maybe it's because they don't have anywhere to train or compete!!!

Rugby:
The Six Nations Cup started a few weeks ago with England running away victorious in their first 2 games. The only rivals to England to win the cup were France, but they took a beating against the Irish in Dublin last week. Ireland basically closed down for 3 days whilst everyone stayed in the pubs 24 hours a day watching repeat after repeat.

Politics:
Everyone is getting ready for the announcement for the date of the next General Election, which is widely rumoured to be in May. Oh Yeah, we're really excited and can't wait to vote for our favourite party! The differences between the 2 main parties here is diminishing year on year. It seems to be a matter of who can ridicule the other in the cleverest way like a school playground game. And they wonder why people don't go out to vote? We're all proud to life in a country where we have the right to vote in the next political party, but with no depth to any of these representatives it's a difficult choice to make and people are now using their right of not voting, which is a real shame. We're paying the most in Europe for petrol, food, insurance, taxes, white goods, cars etc. etc. and the politicians of today are more interested in their own well-being with new stories of 'sleaze' coming out each week.



More from cynic Rob Burge next month when he might be able to speak of a Welsh rugby victory, and home grown British food that WON'T kill the consumer. Also more news on the Millennium Dome (London) where the £1bn project is being auctioned off in £10 lots!!!!

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