You're probably right, Paul

Last July I went to my local furniture store to find a new mattress. I came out having ordered a full package of bed, mattress and headboard. Which says much for (a) their marketing tactics and (b) my gullibility. A few weeks later came the delivery, which was fine except ... no headboard . Fast forward a few months and the headboard arrived but unfortunately wasn't the correct one. Thence to November: another headboard which ... had the wrong screw holes. Today (nearly 7 months after my order) yet another replacement arrived and ... you've got it, it was the wrong colour. As it happens I don't think I would have noticed if the delivery guys hadn't pointed it out, so I said "that's fine; I'll take it".

Anyway, I'm not going to tell you about that, as this is a serious blog not a diary of the details of my unremarkable and mundane life. Instead I'm going to talk about Paul Keating who was born 2 days after me. The former Australian Prime Minister recently grandly announced his opinion that Britain “suffers delusions of grandeur and relevance deprivation”.

I think that's probably true. Further, I thought it long before he did. Not saying he's been influenced by my blog but you never know. If you're out there Paul give us a comment. Now Keating is a long-standing supporter of an Australian republic, so perhaps you'd expect that from him. On this occasion he was incensed by remarks by UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss that China could engage in military aggression in the Pacific as "nothing short of demented".

"The reality is Britain does not add up to a row of beans when it comes to East Asia. Britain took its main battle fleet out of East Asia in 1904 and finally packed it in with its ‘East of Suez’ policy in the 1970s. And it has never been back."

The truth, of course, is that Britain has always been guilty of overreach. Post-Empire we are a small country with a much diminished military and a couple of big bang nukes which no sane Prime Minister would ever use. Perfidious Albion is the master of bluster and bluff. Vladimir Putin will be shaking in his boots.

Government ministers are terribly fond of saying that "Britain is the best ... the UK was the first ..." in a vain attempt to believe we are still important in the world. "Best soft power ... national health service which is the envy of the world ... the Premier League is the best in Europe ...  leading the way ..." It's embarrassing. And mostly incorrect. Most of all, it's patronising to the rest of the world.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a disorder where people with this condition have an inflated idea of themselves and a need for lots of attention from other people. Sounds like us as a nation? No wonder no-one likes us ("bloody patronising poms"). Time to settle down, people, know our place and ... get rich. Like the Swiss.

I quite like my country; I'm happy living here, although I believe that, all other things being equal, I'd be just as happy in many of the world's countries. By any definition of a patriot, I am probably not one. The Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (in 1913) wrote "I am willing to serve my country, but my worship I reserve for Right which is far greater than my country. To worship my country as a god is to bring a curse upon it."

Looking forward to sitting up against my headboard tonight, reading a book which I shall tell you about shortly.