VISITING England last month persuaded me that Canada is not the only Country of the Crazy. Angleterre takes second place to none.

Black savages used to put bones in their noses. In the UK, white savages put rings in their noses. How they blow them I don’t know. Perhaps they don’t.

You see the same sort of thing here. But you see much more of it there. It’s a sign of the times, much like the fla- gellants in medieval times. Remind me to ask my social worker about it.

Newsweek magazine sees London as “the world’s coolest city.” Cheers and jeers all round.

I asked a lot of people why madness reigns but they could only shrug.

Consider what writer Auberon Waugh has called “the litigation culture.”

Everyone is suing every~ one else. School kids who fai] their exams are suing the _ teachers.

“Seventy failed pupils to sue their schools,” (for giv- ing them a bad education) read the headline. If they win, they could be awarded

anything up to $200,000

each.

One wonders whether the teachers will counter-sue, claiming the little brats did-

n’t try hard enough. Let’s hope So.

Then there’s the teenager who sued his school and got over $60,000 after claiming other kids had bullied him. Shades of Tom Brown’s school days. Shades of my

school days, when boys were boys.

In Scotland, police who were called out for the Dunblane disaster claim they were “traumatized” and that they too deserve some funds. Others want money on account of stressful soccer riots.

Shall we see British troops suing the commanders for making the wrong moves? Or for not having the rations delivered on time? “The tea weren’t ot, Yer Honor.”

Blame the welfare state. Everyone is entitled to legal aid, which in England, as in Canada, applies to civil as well as to criminal cases.

Legal aid cust the British taxpayers $4 billion last year.

Then tnere’s the Church of England, now the devil in cassocks. But the devil has always pretended to be holy.

- Beelzebub’s little helpers at Southwark Cathedral host- ed what one commentator called “a sickening homosex- val jamboree” for the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement. Queers flocked in from all ever — more than 2,000 of them.

Paul Johnson, the noted journalist and historian, says that the Church of England

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An Anglican priest even held a memorial service fora monkey. But who was really the monkey?

Meanwhile, Selfridges and other stores won't let children sit on Santa’s knee for fear there will be child abuse charges.

Crime dominates the front pages. If you ever had the idea that England was a safe country, you need a new idea,

Three out of 10 people in London have been victims of crime in the past year.

A headmasier was recent- ly stabbed to death by a 15- year-old multiculter.

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A young guy who burned a tramp to death got three years. Whether he had any shame or remorse was not recorded.

In the middle-class com- munity of Chandler's Ford, near Southampton, a dozen teenagers attacked a man for no reason and he was put into hospital with serious injuiies. It doesn’t even make the national news.

But trivia does. Forests are sacrificed to cover idiciic stories.

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“Fergie, Duchess of Pork,” are recorded religiously and the sex lives of showbiz and sports folk loom large.

Fourteen-yeas-old Prince William shoots his first stag in the Highiands. It is worth gallons of ink, even in the “better” press. “Should the Prince shoot a stag?” It’s a big national question.

Things wili get worse before they get better, if they ever get better.

The present managers of this theatre of the absurd are bad enough. But the Labor Party kas a 37-point lead in the polis and it will be worse.

They plot unlikely won- ders.

— The North Shore News believes strongly in freedom of speech and the right of all sides in a debate to be heard. The columnists published in the News present differing points of view, but those views are not necessarily those of the newspaper

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