Agent Lily

No doubt a double agent in these strange times. Met Lily for the first time as Luna and I did the morning dog walk around Ottobeuren. Quite some distance away, the moment she spotted Luna, she started jumping up high in the air like a jack in the box and the jumps got higher and more frequent the closer we got.

She was a lovely young girl, just 6 months old and ever so friendly and playful. Even Luna didn't get too upset at her presence. I did ask the owner if I could take a photo to use on my diary and so send a greeting to Lily's distant relation, Agent Orange a.k.a. Murphy who lives in a southern English city with a historic Cathedral. Agent Lily is a Fox Terrier but Agent Orange a Welsh. Last year at the same spot, Luna and I met Milo an Airedale Terrier that I thought was a Welsh and strangely Agent Orange who got his temporary name on my birthday was a "replacement" for his blood-related predecessor, Milo who died on my daughter's birthday two months earlier.

So lots of strange connections to this type of terrier and another very pleasant encounter.

The events in Westminster at long last gave me the chance to really laugh:

Mrs May admitted a 37% vote against her was "significant" (48% wasn't)
Rees Mogg saying 63% for her was enough for the PM to go to the Queen and resign as it showed a clear failure (52% wasn't)
No doubt he will be demanding the 1922 Committee rescind the one-year immunity clause and introduce a proper democratic referendum vote on the PM, as often as he thinks necessary until he gets the result he wants.
And that arch Brexit LBC Radio person Nico Bugatti today said the referendum should never have been allowed to take effect without at least a 60:40 majority - why is he saying this now?
And a young Brexit colleague on the so-called "Pledge" debate on SkyNews whose name I don't know but think she started her journey to stardom in "The Apprentice", said for the first time, something very true - one can trace back today's woes to the failure of governments to introduce Proportional Representation and the 4 million or so, 2015 UKIP voters got no directly elected MPs and thus no official voice, thereby feeling even more angry. It would have actually have been better to have them in Parliament where they could have been put to the test and probably have failed, thus killing the UKIP idea in its infancy.

Just today in the German Parliament, the UKIP equivalent, the AfD had for the second time one of their candidates rejected for a post as "Deputy Speaker" - each opposition party is entitled to have two such deputies and in a normal procedural nod of heads the candidates are approved by a vote of the whole house. This is just one of the many things that go on showing them up for what they are. And certainly, at the moment, they are fading into a black hole but it is important the other parties don't even try to take up any of their ideologies which was the big failure of the Bavarian conservatives in this autumn's state elections. Luckily they have realised this and pulled back.