OUT OF EUROPE, OUT OF RICHMOND, INTO FRANCE

I vote out of Europe. Not because of Boris Johnson. In fact, the more business people who comment that it would be bad for UK business to leave the EU, the more I realise it is in their interest and that they have been taking advantage of the benefits and not passing them onto the customer.    I don't think they are on 'our side'.  They are on their side.  That may, very occasionally, be the same as 'our side', but it is only by accident.  But not on staying in the EU.

Not that I have anything against Europe. I love it.   Its wonderful. And I love living in France. I love the food, the French, the weather, even when it rains, and the parking.  There are no parking attendants where I live in France, there are parking spaces and there are no road works.    I don't even care about the adders in the back garden and the slow tractors because there are supposed to be tractors in the countryside.  We are the ones who are foreign.  And as for the adders - better the venomous snakes that slither than those you meet on the streets of SW London.   And there are no traffic jams in France where I live.  I mention traffic jams because this morning it was horrible in Richmond.

 I took a journey today that takes less than 10 minutes normally.  It took me ten minutes to get out of my street.   It took just under an hour to drive half a mile.    Gridlocked by gasworks and mummy mafia driving four wheel drives painfully slow, extension building builders double parking vans, with builders  working overtime (bonking blisteringly bored kept wives), and smug cyclists dodging doors opening at any opportunity of huffing and puffing businessmen trying to look powerful, I've got fed up of Richmond.   If there is road rage over the next few days, the local council should be considered culpable.   They are guilty of poor planning, for not banning four wheel drives in a town that doesn't need four wheel drives, and for allowing bankers to take over homes where creative types once lived, and adding extensions to their homes to make them into the homogenous colourless characterless places that mirror their own homogenous colourless characterless personalities.    Richmond Upon Thames is becoming incredibly beige and boring and it had magic twelve years ago.   Even the planes are starting to bug me now.