The Florida diary continues

This was from a couple of days ago, but I’m moving it up, because it vanished for a day or two.

Today was more of a family day than a Florida tourist day. We visited a relative who lives on one of the keys looking out over the Gulf of Mexico. It was a lovely visit. She’s quite infirm, but nevertheless managed to be a gracious hostess. The kids had a fabulous time. They frolicked in the Gulf, while I sat on a beach as fine and white as powdered sugar and sorted through shells that looked like fairy wings — they were pink, and white, and yellow, and shiny, and scalloped. It was a real treat to sift them through my fingers.

I also spent a lot of time talking to my relative’s housekeeper, a delightful women, about my age (mid-ish 40s). The moment she opened her mouth, I knew we’d have a lot to talk about because it was clear she was from Yorkshire, where I spent my college year abroad in the early 80s. Indeed, I’d lived in her hometown.

She told me that the town had changed beyond recognition, partly because of new construction and because so many London businesses had opened branches there. The main difference, though, is the influx of Pakistanis into the North. She said that everything I’ve read in the British newspapers about what’s happening in England, and especially in the North is true, except that the reality is 10X worse. Every English person she knows is putting to together whatever money he or she can find to retire outside of England.

She says heroin addiction is at record levels in England, with the Pakistani immigrants serving as the main suppliers, with many getting hugely rich in the process. She said that schools now have the school’s name written in Arabic as well as English. She said that the Pakistanis enter the country and line up for the dole. She doesn’t think new immigrants should get any benefits at all, but they and all their wives get money, and then many go back to live in Pakistan on English money.

She went on and on, getting quite emotional about England’s suicide. She blamed Tony Blair’s government, saying that the government lives in the South where it’s insulated from the grand social experiments that are destroying England, beginning in the north. England, she says, is the only country with unlimited immigration paired with unlimited government benefits.

Lastly, she said that everyone in England quotes Enoch Powell who, in the late 1970s or early 1980s was fired from government warning against taking in the Muslims since, he said, there’d be blood in the streets. “He knew what he was talking about.”

And now to bed, for Disney’s Animal Adventure Park (or whatever it’s called) awaits us tomorrow.


Bookworm
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