We re-watched the 1956 3 Men movie with my dad the other day and were shocked (him included, having loved it as a kid) at how unfunny it was in a sort of sad, proto-Mr. Bean kind of way. Definitely a forward echo of Victorian stiffness and parochialism in the 50s as well, I think.

He did do a follow-up about cycling in Germany called Three Men on the Bummel, but unless you're into the history of the Victorian cycling craze or enjoyed Three Men in a Boat a LOT, YMMV

absolutely wild that this stayed up and running for 35 years and not, to pick an example completely at random, 6 months tops.

yes deeply disappoint

Stained glass restorer (hence obsessively following every @stonkers.bsky.social skeet)

Strong argument to be made that so is Austria

As in, it is not simply a natural evolution of the terms of trade that Huddersfield ended up exporting "Dacca cotton" to Dhaka. A lot of work specific to how colonialism functions went into making that the case.

No but it is... something to use the administrative power of the state (that you borrowed without asking) to deliberately rejig whole economies from tertiary value-add to primary monocrop, to your benefit. Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton is really good on these dynamics, if of interest

I think "colonial patterns of trade" slightly glosses over the brute force by which those patterns were established - industrialisation in the UK was facilitated by the deliberate de-industrialisation of places under colonial rule like Bengal, with pretty dire consequences for the latter.

but why would you go to Jamie's Deli when you could gorge yourself on kaya toast and kopi for a fraction of the price somewhere deep in the bowels of Changi?

Side-note, faintly surreal to see airports turning into archives of forgotten chains - want to revisit the 2000s? Go to Heathrow, where you can still shop at WHSmith and eat at Carluccio's or Giraffe

What they're essentially saying is, given that elements of the social safety net are (rightly!) baked into how normal people move through life in the UK in a way that's pretty hard to avoid, "you must never integrate"

Eagerly anticipating the first deployment of the "Nobody's Perfect" defence