Sixty years after I had drunk my first cup of "smooth and satisfying" International Roast at Barton House, and almost after I had made myself the sixty-sixth cup of coffee from this 100g-tin which promises that it "Makes up to 66 cups", I not only keep scratching the bottom of this tin but also my head as I wonder what to make of the ramblings of our "Leader of the Free World".
"We're very far ahead of schedule", he says, and that the war was "very complete, pretty much", with "nothing left in a military sense", while his Defense Department announces, "This is just the beginning".
The "free world" is lead by an orange man-child, who is one half extreme emotional damage and the other half rambling idiot with no ideas of what he is saying from one sentence to the next. Trump never made any sense, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that he hasn't managed to coherently state his war objectives; indeed, we're left to wonder if he could locate Tehran on a map. "We could call it a tremendous sucess right now ... or we could go further. And we're going further", he says, while the Iranian government announces that they have a huge stockpile of supreme leaders left to inflict more damage. In the meantime, there has been a sudden rush on football uniforms as women in the Middle East are trying to seek refuge in Australia.
I'm again scratching the bottom of the tin because this current state of the world needs more than just one cup of "smooth and satisfying" International Roast, which keeps reminding me of what a much better world looked like when I had my first cup of International Roast more than sixty years ago. Things were then still "smooth and satisfying".
In fact, things also seemed "smooth and satisfying" in what was then still Persia when the Shah-in-Shah was the ruler of the country. Not that I knew much of the country other than what I could read in what was then the German equivalent of "The Women's Weekly" about Soraya and, subsequently, about Farah Diba, the second wife he married to maintain the dynasty. I remember my mother reading a Bertelsmann book simply titled, "Soraya". It was kept in a glass cabinet under lock and key for no discernible reason, but here it is again, in a movie remake from 2003.
I learned a bit more about Persia when I went there in January 1976 as accountant for the Williams pipeline company. I had just come out of tropical Burma and Tehran was freezing cold and I didn't last very long, but neither did the Shah who went into exile in 1979 and died in 1980.
