Back-to-front and upside-down

It’s not just texts in furrin languages that I sing without hearing the meaning. For some reason, from when we learnt it as kids as a function of some education director’s dawning multicultural flushblush to now, I’ve always sung “My heart is down,/my head is turning around,/I had to leave a little girl in Kingston…

Pan-European tax system already with us?

I’ve always billed using my national fiscal number, but now I’ve got some loon telling me that I can’t do that anymore cross-border and that I need a European fiscal number. It would be nice if someone had told us. It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing we’ll get to vote on anyway.

Ranters initiation song

Completely off-topic but delightful, this is from The Joviall Crew, or the Devill turn’d Ranter: being a character of the roaring Ranters of these Times, represented in a Comedie. Containing a true discovery of the cursed conversations, prodigious pranks, monstrous meetings, private performances, rude revellings, garrulous greetings, impious and incorrigible deportements of a sect (lately…