This blog is subtitled "observations and opinions"; here's a non-LUL related opinion.

I was very saddened to read the comments John Cleese made on Australian TV recently, saying that “London is no longer an English city” and “I love being down in Bath because it feels like the England that I grew up in.” Cleese grew up in Weston Super Mare which he described earlier this year as “a tedious little place” that wasn’t worth the bombs the Germans dropped on it in 1940.

I would like to think that like Morrissey a few years ago what he was trying to say that it is the English people who are less English, that increasingly we seem to be aping the styles and mannerisms of the USA and that it is the English themselves that are allowing their culture to be diluted (even though we have been subject to various foreign cultural influences ever since the Romans arrived and the locals swapped their woad for togas).

I would like to think that or I would like to think he was being deliberately provocative, I would like to think that his comments were tongue in cheek but sadly I suspect he is just a pathetic 71-year old racist ranting against immigrants.

John Cleese has lived in California for over 20 years.

I will still watch “Life of Brian” every Christmas and Easter but I don’t think I will ever move to Weston Super Mare.