Igenlode Wordsmith

I have been a bit surprised that YouTube, despite having decided that I am a Russian-speaker when it comes to displaying comments, nonethless continues to show me English-language advertisments in the middle of Russian-language programming -- presumably this aspect of the site is based on your ISP's geographical location rather than viewing habits. I have had a couple of solitary occurrences of "Please donate to our brave Ukrainian boys" featuring young men in tanks, possibly aimed at soliciting donations from the Ukrainians who fled to Britain; today I was very amused to get for the first time an advert that was clearly aimed at the Russian population, from a company claiming to offer you European citizenship and corresponding visa privileges. They will sell you spurious *Bulgarian* nationality -- no need to speak the language, no need ever to have set foot in the country, no need to alter your life at all: it is a purely nominal transaction. As if by magic, you are no longer a Russian, but a 'European'... evidently a highly-saleable aspiration!

(To be fair, this does remind me of the desperate scramble amongst certain of my acquaintance to claim to be 'Irish' with zero links to the country, in order to acquire privileged access to the EU; the Irish government was very generously offering to offer succour to all those with distant relatives in the past who might wish to disclaim their embarrassing English existence. Which, as it happens, applies to me personally and to my cousins, even though our ancestors actually come from the Unionist side of the border and would presumably have been horrified by any such idea :-p)

Just received a call from a Channel 4 researcher who was interested in interviewing people who were denied a vote at the recent local elections (and who got my details from the Electoral Reform Society, to whom I had put in a formal complaint)...