Got a flyer from Patricia McKenna telling me 80% of our laws are made, sorry, ‘start’, in Brussels.
There was this one time I was at a friend’s wedding and, outside the church, his mother made her way over to me with her boyfriend. We exchanged a couple of pleasantries, and then she said to me something that I in my hungover state imagined was one of these knowing folksy rustic jokes that gets rolled out at weddings, emanating from a culture to which I myself feel almost completely alien. So I smiled a genteel smile and laughed as though I too was in on the joke. Then, she repeated it, and still unable to fathom what the hell she was talking about, I smilled and nodded again, as if to say, yes, I got you the first time. Then she repeated it again, and I was still unable to shape the sounds coming out of her mouth into some form of words that I recognised. Puzzled, I decided to come clean, figuring my candour would prevent me from looking like a total idiot.
“I’m sorry, but to tell the truth I don’t have a clue what that means.”
She replied, “I said, have you met Peter?”
Peter -who I indeed had met and even endured as he once prattled on to me about his beloved Fianna Fáil party- looked on aghast from behind his wig.
Anyway, the point is. Patricia McKenna is telling me 80% of laws start in Brussels. Even if that is true, and I strongly suspect that it isn’t, I really don’t have a clue what that means. What if the other 20% not made in Brussels contain all 80% the microphysical oppressiveness, you know, stuff like only being allowed to take a piss in town if your other hand is on a horse? But I also strongly suspect that either the woman is an idiot, or she takes me for an idiot, or that idiot takes me for an idiot.
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