There'll Always Be an England, and Kathy Flake Is There

If it's not time for the giggles, it should be. And it will be, when you read Kathy Flake on life in her neck of the British woods the past week:

Our alert status has been downgraded from critical to severe. We can now carry one piece of hand luggage on our flights, but no liquids. The British patience has been sorely tested four days into our transport trial, with airport authorities the targets of the whinging. Flights are still not back to normal, although John Lennon Airport in Liverpool and Robin Hood Airport near Nottingham are experiencing no delays, proving peaceniks and poverty campaigners can at least run airports properly.

Over the weekend we learned some of the suspects were white converts to Islam, residents of the "stockbroker belt" in south Buckinghamshire. I'm not so surprised to find out my neighbors are terrorists, but to realize I'm surrounded by stockbrokers is somewhat unsettling. (Elsewhere they've been called "elderly snobs". I guess that's what happens when stockbrokers retire.)

Now they're scouring the woods near High Wycombe for evidence. If there are explosives in the woods I hope they find them, and while they're at it they should pick up the litter too. The resident stockbrokers don't bother to pick up their rubbish, I've noticed.

This morning someone from the estate agent's office was out here, and as she was leaving she said the solution to our current problem was to stop letting people from other countries into Britain -- "Not you, of course," she assured me.

Then she reminded me that years ago everyone here was blond-haired and blue-eyed. (That lets me out; I'm definitely not blonde, and my eyes are just about every color but blue.)

Knowing my neighbors are racists is almost as upsetting as learning they're stockbrokers.