A tale of two Carries

Neville Sarony May 04, 2021 11:22

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”, the classic opening lines of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities can readily be applied to the Two Carries – Lam in Hong Kong and Symonds in London.

The best of times for them, the worst of times for others.

To begin with the Carrie, the First Fiancée of Great Britain’s imitation prime minister, presumably she is carving out a future career as an interior designer for Trump properties.

Once you have hung the gold wallpaper, where else is there to go but the lavatory? After all, any self-adoring leader needs to sit on a gilded throne.

One can almost hear the lip-curling contempt dripping from her as she vocally cauterised Theresa May’s choice of furnishings. To TFF’s eyes, furniture from the iconic John Lewis department store falls far below her idea of good taste.

One only needs to measure that against the gold wallpaper to judge where good taste is to be found.

There again, if some sleazebag seeking enoblement or preferential treatment by the premier hands you £58,000 to spend on doing up Worsel Gummidge’s rather poky flat at No. 10, it is a golden opportunity – if you will pardon the pun – to camp it up.

It appears that neither the man with the haystack hairstyle nor TFF thought that this profligacy jarred egregiously with those forced to lose their homes because lockdown meant lost jobs, eviction and sequestration of mortgaged homes.

You can easily imagine TFF in her Marie Antoinette tones saying, “buy them off with a few crumbs of comfort”.

The bumbler-in-chief tried to bluster his way out of wallpaper-gate, but the words lacked credibility, which goes for so much of what he says, because it all sounds as though he has half Brighton beach and a doughnut in his mouth.

But the nepotism and downright sleaze of Blusterbum’s chummery passes high over the heads of the flag-waving patriotic numpties that still subscribe to the theory that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.

Why does no one ever give a thought to the Rifle Brigade’s East-Enders from the Walworth Road or the Brigade of Guards Geordies who signed on rather than starve? Without them, Waterloo would have been a disaster rather than a “damn close run thing”.

But Stumbledumb has never served in the military, the only person he serves is the one he sees in the looking glass.

I digress.

Previously best known for dismantling the Queen’s Pier, Carrie the Destroyer ensures that her consort, Dr. Lam Siu-por, keeps to the comfort of the shadows.

One cannot help but ponder on this each time one hears that dreaded indictment of some Hongkonger who has offended the central government because “they have foreign connections,” an automatic disqualification from being regarded as patriots, whatever that means.

Dr. Lam and his two sons by La Lam are all British citizens. No wonder she has to punctuate her every public pronouncement with praise for the central government.

Who can ever forget the abject misery on the poor man’s face at the 2019 event to celebrate the handover of Macau, let alone his failure to register on the clapometer.

We can be certain sure that had he been around when Carrie was forced to move out of her government quarters into a serviced flat, Dr. Lam, an expert in algebraic topography would have known where to get toilet rolls.

It was as I pondered this apparent conflict of personalities that a Eureka moment struck home: the latest iteration of opaque government regulations covering bars, restaurants, night clubs, weddings, funerals and so forth were never passed by him first.

The parameters strike one as oddly disparate. An outdoor church gathering can have 100% of its congregation but anyone else assembling in public is limited to four. It must be something to do with Madame La Lam’s Catholic upbringing.

Dr. Lam is an expert in homeomorphism, which I understand to be a function that is a one-to-one mapping between sets such that both the function and its inverse are continuous and that in topology exists for geometric figures which can be transformed one into the other by an elastic deformation.

Quite.

Unquestionably, Queen Carrie has mastered the art of elastic deformation.

Perhaps it takes mathematical genius to make sense out of his wife’s increasingly incomprehensible pronouncements, now to be heard on a regular RTHK programme that she will host.

As Frankie Howerd would have said “What a Carrie on!”

Both Lord Bumbleton and the good doctor would do well to heed the wise words of the late great American humorist Will Rogers when he said that there are two theories to arguing with a woman. Neither works.

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Neville Sarony

King's Counsel