What a spiffing way to settle disputes

Sunday Morning, 8am

Its worth getting up early on a Sunday morning to watch the Sky Travel channel's re-runs of Whickers World and particularly the current series of Whicker In India from 1970.

The current programme sees Whicker visiting a tea plantation owned by the sort of englishman that you only find in PG Wodehouse or Agatha Christie novels, the old Etonian who's family own a plantation the size of Wales in some remote area of the empire and who's answer to all and every problem is to get the Purdey down from above the fireplace and give the blighters both barrels.

I've just got a stich from laughing (and woken up everyone else in the house, I think we have a guest in the eldest's bedroom again but I'm not going to look, he's left his shoes on the doormat at least) at the description of an old established Indian method of negotiating labour disputes with your boss.

Apparently, and they have a name for it which I missed through my tears of mirth, its acceptable practice for disputing workers to surround their boss-man to harrangue him without violence for as long as it takes to get him to acquiesce to their demands, in some cases this quaint form of negotiation has taken days to resolve, and always without violence, because its tradition and you don't break tradition by murdering your boss, its just not the British way.

Henry Twistleton-Smythe the old Etonian plantation owner who is the subject of the programme, clad in regulation beige safari suit with pipe clenched between pursed lips, accent cutting glass even more precisely than Whickers, explained how he had once been surrounded by his aggrieved workers whilst out driving the estate in his Land Rover, when Whicker asked him what he had done with no other white man within five hours drive, he replied that he had "wound up the windows, lit a pipe and read The Times for four hours until the blighters gave up on their dispute"

You see, you just don't get stoicism like that amongst Englishmen these days, its little wonder that we no longer have an empire when good solid British stock like Twistleton-Smythe have been allowed to disappear into remote parts of the red-painted atlas where good British breeding females are so thin on the ground, if only we'd kept at least one breeding pair in captivity back in blighty then we wouldn't be in quite the state that we are now.