Cold Truth and Hot Dog.

Britain (and I offer an apology for punting on the home stable) is big because she is big enough to know how small she is. After all, Humility is only a sense of proportion, and a sense of proportion is essential to the painting of mind-pictures. Working the argument to skin and bone, the greatness of bigness is not a matter of arms, alms, mechanised morals, dehumanised commerce, and hot dog generally, but an unawareness of the greatness of Greatness and a realisation of things as they are and not necessarily as they are advertised.

Britons are what might be termed two-handed sentimentalists or manual thinkers, which are aliases of the idealist. A dreamer is a still-life worker, or an example of slow emotion, but an idealist acts his own scenarios, and never looks back.

Looking back is backing luck with an overdue promissory note or trying to refill a bottle with the headache it produced. The skipper who steers with his eyes on his wake is due to wake where ships have wings and sailors don't have to care. It is said that history repeats itself: if so, why look back at it, when by waiting for it to catch up, you can get it on the second bounce.

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It is impossible at this juncture to say who won the great European fracture, but Britain is prepared to post the Past as missing and write off the cost of breakages. This is forgiveness with cash discount, and is so oblivious of the obvious that it is almost sublime.