by Keith Evans
Not wishing to offend our guests I try to be diplomatic during my talks. If I suspect that there are overseas visitors I try to gear my oratory accordingly. If there are Germans present I steel myself not to be too jingoistic about our past affrays. The French are a bit touchy. I avoid mentioning scallops or Trafalgar although they did harass our Packet ships and frequently carry out incursions on our coast so I, with deliberate intent, direct them into the Packet gallery hoping they will see the oil painting on the end wall. We don't seem to attract many Spanish visitors so the Armada or their incursions are not usually a problem.
The Americans don't like to hear that they came into the war rather late and only then because the Japanese had a go at them. They did lease us a lot of equipment including some old WWI destroyers. We blew up one of the rust buckets at St Nazaire. They didn't get it back but we still had to pay for it.
The Scandanavians produce some very nice friendly blondes but don't mention the Swedes to the Norwegians. They don't seem to like one another.
Nearer to home, my diplomacy did fail on one occasion when a visitor mentioned the coal depot on County Wharf. I told him it was imported coal for domestic use. He turned out to be a redundant Yorkshire miner.
Changing the subject, we had another odd-ball visitor. He had a camera in one hand and a blue rubber duck in the other. He posed the duck on the boats, the helicopter and the beach buggy, amongst many other sites and proceeded to photograph the said duck. I didn't like to ask him why. 'Quakers' I thought, but fairly harmless. After all, he could have had an elephant obsession.
