It appears that while Chuck0 is fighting the power, my beloved girlfriend Tess has been feeding it cake. At the moment and for the last five weeks, the darling girlf has been in Vietnam, recording stuff for the BBC (with her friend, a minor descendant of Romanian royalty, but enough of that). All of the following is my understanding, based on garbled telephone conversations, but I believe it to be substantially true.
When she rocked up to Hanoi, Tess found it annoyingly bereft of quirky local human-interest stories. So, for reasons which I would not claim to understand, for the last week, she's been organising and promoting "The Great Hanoi Cake-Banking Contest", to be judged by His Excellency the French Ambassador tomorrow. They're going to be holding it at the Hanoi Hilton (not that one, the actual Hilton hotel in Hanoi).
Among the star guests are the local representatives of *both* the IMF *and* the World Bank! They've not yet got onto the judging panel, but apparently they're going to be walking round tasting the cakes along with the local dignitaries. I can only assume that there's not a lot going on in Vietnam for them at the moment. Do I get a prize for feeding Communist patisserie to the New World Government? Or does this qualify as "weak shit" (I suppose it probably does).
God knows how this will develop . . . . .
dd
___________________________________________________________________________
_____
---------------------------------------------------------
This email is confidential to the ordinary user of the
e-mail address to which it was addressed. If you are not
the intended recipient, please notify the sender
immediately on (44) 20 7638 5858 and delete the message
from all locations in your computer. You should not copy
this email or use it for any purpose, or disclose its
contents to any person : to do so may be unlawful.
Email is an informal method of communication and is
subject to possible data corruption, either accidentally
or on purpose. Flemings is unable to exercise control
over the content of information contained in
transmissions made via the Internet. For these reasons
it will normally be inappropriate to rely on information
contained on email without obtaining written confirmation
of it.
----------------------------------------------------------