heelers sorts out the korean peninsula

Evening at the chateau.

My cousin Frances and I are hatching cups of tea in the kitchen.

It is the same Frances who can eviscerate a classroom full of teenage hoodlums at fifty paces with a single blow of her tongue.

"Where did you get the tea set?" wonders Frances, admiring the brightly coloured cups and plates.

"Miss Korea gave it to me," I tell her.

"Miss Korea?"

"Yes," sez I. "I never met such a girl to give me presents. That tea set there. The ornamental Korean screen you saw in the hall. The Korean fan hanging over the mirror in the dining room, all those are from her. My writing desk is covered with Korean pens."

"You have a writing desk?"

"Okay, it's more a ranting at Muslims desk, but yes."

"Oh."

"And there's Korean money in my wallet which she gave me as a keep sake. She gave me a Korean diary.There's some sort of a Korean symbol stuck to my mobile phone. There's a Korean flag on my key ring. If you open the larder you'll find a ruddy great jar of undrinkable Korean tea. That book over there about China, she gave me that because she knew I was interested in China."

"And the tea set's Korean too?" wondered Frances.

"We thought it was," I explained. "But actually she heard me calling it my Korean tea set and burst out laughing. Then she told me she bought it in Ireland."

"Why did she give you all those things?" prodded Frances.

"Damned if I know," sez me.

"And where is she now?"

"That's just it," sez me. "Damned if I know again. She gave me all these presents. Then she disappeared. Doesn't ring me. Doesn't take my phone calls. It's most strange. The only bright side has been that I worry less now about the Korean political situation. The tensions between North and South Korea. In the past I was constantly concerned that North Korea would shortly obliterate South Korea. I have had a modest interest in political situations in various countries worldwide. Sometimes my analysis of what's going on in them is quite unsettlingly close to the mark. With Korea, whenever I looked at it, I would shake my head with more than a modicum of desolation. I had an awful feeling that Mr Kim the dictator running North Korea would soon make good on his promise to detonate atomic weapons in South Korea. And whenever the aforementioned psycho dictator made one of his periodic statesmanlike I'll kill you all announcements, I'd shake my head and murmur: He isn't joking. And I would be morose and sullen and slightly depressed and so on. Because my analysis is so rarely wrong. And it seemed to me that South Korea was living in the shadow of the scythe. And I had an unerring feeling that a terrible conflagration was at hand for all those people. But now. Now after Miss Korea stopped talking to me. Now whenever the dictator in North Korea threatens to exterminate the entire population of South Korea, I just shrug my shoulders and murmur: Ah well, nobody lives forever."