A Message from B Panda

Hello, Bugger the Panda here.

Before any of you reach for the RED BUTTON and report the blog to the News of The World and me to the SSPCA, let me explain. It is all Gordon Brown’s fault!

I am a Glesca Panda and I bet you didn’t know that such a thing exists! Yes I was born and raised in Glesca Toon actually in the Ibrox area of Sunny Govan. I am really an Ibrox Panda Bear.

We have been indigenous to Ibrox for over three thousand years! The weather was quite good then and bamboo flourished well but, as the climate changed we had to adapt and we did quite well. A lot of people think that Ibrox was named after badgers but really it was named, by short sighted weegies on the Electric Soup, after us Pandas.

We came up the Clyde in a dugout canoe and have just blended into the landscape by becoming nocturnal and generally keeping our heids low.

Things have changed recently most all for the better and your human government has played its part, albeit unwittingly, in letting us come out of the shadows. For one thing we have rights and elfinsafety has definitely helped too. I had a pad in Ibrox, thanks to somebody called Purcell and the GHA but I live in Shanghai now. I do miss home and fish suppers. Better than the Bamboo twigs I get here. I used to attend Ibrox Stadium, when they had a reasonable team some years back and, in order to blend in, I even learned to play the flute. That’s me below playing the scales.

I joined a Flute Band in order to get some dosh and blend in. I told them that my 'apron' was from an ultra secret Orange Lodge and they swallied it. This, I think is a perfect example of what Stephen Hawkins calls Social Darwinism, in reverse.

I’m a pining Panda for Glesca Toon, especially week-ends in the Merchant City when everybody gets dressed up in fancy claes and gets blootered. I join alang wae them and can get a right guid swally with nobody looking sideways at me. The wine bars are the best, everybody there is soo PC. The Clenched Buttocks ones say bugger all to me normally but often they, the good looking female ones, buy me a nice red claret or two. You would be amazed how often I score. If they ask who I am and I am not in a good mood I snarl my name to them and then the word “off”. They do so usually. In fact by 11 o’clock in the Merchant City I look the most normal. Often as I stagger back to my pad, well lubed, the Polis stop their Panda cars and gie me a lift. They think it is all very funny, very a propos, I just keep the geggie shut and fart quietly in the back seat. I think next day, everybody I have seen or talked to must wake up, think, and then say naw, it was all due to the drink. So far, so good.

So how come I am in Shanghai if I am a true Ibrox bear? Easy, I got blootered one Hogmanay and got lost. I ended up in Paisley and then Glasgow Airport. Wandering about the place was dead easy, airside as well, since John Smeaton took over running the whole airport, everybody in a uniform was pissed. John should stick to politics, I think.

Anyway, I woke up in Heathrow with no ticket or passport. Have you ever heard of a Panda with a passport? So what did the Wombats, aka the UK Borders Agency PLC do, they put me on the first flight to China, stunning punts! From there it was straight to the Zoo or the hills of Chengdu so I chose the Zoo, at least I can get out of it easily enough. The British Embassy has been as useful as chocolate teapot but I need some Shekels and a fake passport to get a flight home please, somebody. Come to think of it, I wonder has that royalty cheque from the WWF arrived yet, or has Big Al Gore snaffled that too?

So here I am eating bamboo, pining for a decent curry and a nice bottle of red thinking deeply about the political landscape in my native land, as you do. Home thoughts from abroad eh? Maybe later because now, I am going to tell you about China.

When you arrive at the new Shanghai airport, Pu Dong, you can take the Maglev into Shanghai. It takes about 7 minutes, costs about €4 and the top speed is over 430 kph. It can go over 500 kph but is restricted for timetable reasons. See below if you don’t believe me.

If you can’t see clearly, it reads 431 km/h

The Maglev was built by Siemens and is the not only the first they have sold in China but the last as the cunning Chinese are currently engineering it and will soon be building their own, better one. They have to find some use for all the electricity for the new coal burning power stations they are building. One a week, it is said.

In fact it has been calculated somewhere that if the UK shut down tomorrow, the reduction in CO2 emissions would be redressed in one week by the increase in Chinese output.

There are about 22 million people in Shanghai and it is the business centre of the PRC (People's Republic of China).

Internal flights within China are about one third of the price in the rest of the World or even less. There is no Air Tax, especially for Pandas.

The overnight TGV between Shanghai and Beijing takes 9 hours and a bunk, with pot noodle costs about €50. That is for 1,500 km and the trains run on time. The Chinese bought a couple of them and then made their own faster ones.

They are now planning a new second tier cities strategy. These are cities whose name you will not know and who already have well over 1 million inhabitants, Chengdu and other similar cities. These new super cities will be linked with a railway system running at over 500 kph thereby making surrounding towns, within 1 hours train ride, suburbs of the city and within commuting distance as well as allowing fresh produce from the country to be transported into the city daily. Ticket prices will be accessible to the ordinary Chinese, especially as the economy switches from export to domestic consumption. All those balance of payment surpluses from the export led boom are being directed to infrastructure.

Shanghai boasts a downtown that would put any city in the UK to shame. Restaurants, luxury housing, expensive cars and motorway systems all ready with construction working round the clock, seven days per week.

It hosts the second biggest habitable structure, nicknamed locally the lever. It is well over 300 metres tall and if transported into Denmark, where the Global Warming Conference is being held, would be the highest point in the country. The view from top, over the Bund, is spectacular by day or night.

At night the city switches on every possible light bulb on and would be a great reference point for a passing alien spacecraft.

See below

In case anyone thinks that this is all an internal Chinese bubble, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the biggest bank in the World and registered in London has quietly moved its principal working office back to Hong Kong but remains, for the moment registered in London. So when Gordon finally buggers up the City, on the cards from what I read, HKSB will be working under a different regime and paying different taxes to RBS, Lloyds etc and Barclay. That is, if they still exist.

To sum it all fellow Pandas and countrymen, you are buggered. I say you because I am staying here and will play the market from here. Can someone send me Enster Fish Supper Parcels please?

What’s that you say, why is it all Gordon Brown’s fault? Well in one part, the economic part is all axiomatic, Brown destroyed it all for you. He also caused me to be called what I am.

How so, easy.

I was due for baptism in the Govan Parish Church in late February 1951 by one Minister called John Ebenezer Brown. Ahead of me for the sprinkling of LK (Loch Katrine silly) was one James Gordon Brown. As ma Mammy passed me into the hands of the Rev, and was about to tell him my name, snotty pee’d in an arc into the baptismal font and Mammy dropped me on my head.

“Bugger” she said, and Bugger I have always been.

Now if had been the other way round and Snotty had been dropped, He would have been Bugger Brown, which I think would have been very appropriate, don’t you?

Catch you all later

Bugger!

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