what’s getting my goat this week?

well, two things. neither may seem of great consequence, given the apparently momentous events of the last 48 hours ... but to me they are both symbolic and symptomatic of something vaguely unsettling about British identity.

the first thing is what I shall call tokenism. I arrived back at Heathrow quite late on Sunday. surprisingly easy through immigration, despite being with a Moroccan citizen, whose number the Home Office currently deem as ‘hostile unless otherwise proven’. I’m not kidding, that’s official HO speak.

we got to baggage claim and, as always, found a sea of hapless foreigners, first timers in our welcoming land, wondering what a pound coin was and how they could get hold of one to unleash a trolley. I ask you! first off, you can’t get change in Sterling from an overseas bureau de change. second, there are no money exchanges between getting off the plane and baggage claim.

so there they all are. stuck. some try their euros or dirhams to see if they fit. some accost English looking folks asking for a pound coin and gamely offering twenty quid notes in exchange. Tempting and i reckon you could push it to fifty if you waited a bit. Shelley has now got into the habit of keeping a bunch of pound coins in her pocket and

dishes them out like alms to the poor on boxing day.

this situation is pathetic, unreasoned, hostile, petty and infantile.

the second thing and equally bad – Big Ben! and yes I mean the clock, not the Elizabeth Tower in which it is housed.

how long was the wretched thing off games? years I think. it finally chimed again a few months ago and the live stream was up and running again to bring in the BBC News.

Except ...

it’s a botch job! you know when the table is just wonky, whatever you try? you end up with a beer mat or a scrunched up bit of Amazon packaging under one leg. stable but looks like what it is. DIY and crap.

so, in the course of ‘fixing’ Big Ben, this is what I’m speculating happened.

first they spent months taking it to pieces.

then they cleaned every piece with either Brasso or HP sauce or Coke.

then they spent months putting it back together again.

and you guessed it. just like every IKEA flat pack, you raise your arms in triumph and crack open a tin – then you look down and there’s one single dowel thing lying there. bollocks! Well I’m not going to take the bloody thing apart now. you stand it up, whatever ‘it’ is and it’s a bit wonky. you look around but there’s nowhere obvious for the dowel thing to go. so you get a bit of the packaging, wedge it under one side and use one of the kids’ marker pens to daub it roughly the same colour of the whatever-it-is.

so, they finished the whole Big Ben thing.

then they looked down, right to the bottom of the tower ... and there was a small cog, lying on the tiled florr. ‘it can’t matter, can it?’ ‘well we’re not starting again.’

so they crack on and wind up the clock – and find it’s losing time. probably only a couple of seconds a day. so, classic solution to a clock that doesn’t keep time? you tilt it slightly and that corrects it. only problem is the pendulum and hence the tic toc is a little bit off centre so instead of tic toc tic toc you get tictoc tictoc and so on.

now, dear reader, you have to set an Alexa alarm for a couple of minutes before BBC Radio 4 Newstime and listen.. they’ve buggered it up. that century old, reassuring bing bong bing bong, pause, bong bing bong bing is now bing bongbing bong, pause, bong bingbong bing.

I mean! have we paid them? did nobody check. has nobody complained and asked for our money back?

surely this has to be symptomatic of a whole lot of things. the Victorian engineers and John Buchan must be turning in their graves.