Bravo, Cyril, that was a nicely played riposte.

You mentioned conspiracy theory further up which reminded me of someone I met in the early 1980s who became a solid pal until the day he coughed 20 years ago. It was an unusual friendship in that he was 40 years older than me. He was just some recently retired old boy initially who loved a game of snooker at the local club.

The first and best bit of advice he offered me was to get off PAYE and into self-employment, preferably in the cash-in-hand sphere for easy tax efficiency savings that could be made. "More for yourself, less for everyone else," was how he put it. That struck me as odd as he'd just concluded a 38-year stint as a PAYE government employee, but became less so when he produced evidence of his astonishing absenteeism which he was very proud of.

Prior to that he was also in the state's employ as a conscripted soldier who caught the arse end of WW2 to spend three years in Germany as part of the occupational forces. He always described those years as the happiest of his life. He loved everything about Germany; it's language, culture and people, especially the female ones. Whenever he reminisced he'd insist no German ever uttered any criticism of Adolf or his party despite their devastated lives and their country lying in ruins.

He had a habit of making incredible observations as if they were not only true but quite plain. His favourite for shock value was that the Ulster Troubles was a big hoax, as was the Cold War and the whole Soviet era. He'd explain how and why and what were the objectives.

He was always coy about his oracle-like knowledge of how the world really operated rather what we're trained to believe until the day he told me all his info was derived from his father who spent his entire working life waiting tables at two gentlemen's clubs in London, the Athenaeum and White's. The latter, I understand, is so exclusive that no amount of money can secure membership.

Anyway, his old man, he said, couldn't help but earwig numerous conversations as whenever punters begun knocking back the brandy they had few inhibitions. He, his father, hated all of them mostly for their sexual proclivities (children) and their sneering contempt for anyone outside their Luciferian fold.

To digress, the CIA invented the conspiracy theory smear in the late 1960s as a means to dismiss any counter narrative, and hasn't it worked a treat.