In my dancing class last week

[Suff]

The teacher told us that if we're dancing with a different partner every repetition of the dance (changing after each time round) and it keeps going wrong. Don't look to your partner to see what they are doing wrong, try looking at yourself.

Junkcer, today, tells May it will be very, very, very difficult to arrange a trade deal with the UK because we'll be "a foreign country".

CETA, 7 years nearly lost it.

TTIP, 3.5 years and totally lost it.

UK, very, very, very difficult.

One wonders when the EU, in this trade dance, will stop looking at their partner for fault and start looking in the mirror.

Here is another little bit of lateral thinking. In 2010 during the Icelandic volcanic eruption and the grounding of EU air traffic, I found out that Greece has one of the largest soft fruit (mainly raspberry), growing capabilities in the entire EU. Yet the home market for raspberries is virtually 0.00%. What happened was that aircraft brining in trade goods into Greece from around the world left with raspberries as outbound freight. Of course during the volcanic cloud this caused them real pain so we heard about it.

Where am I going with this?

The EU has nearly 140 trade negotiators. The vast majority of whom are British and the best of them tend to be predominantly British.

There is absolutely NO home market for trade negotiators in the UK. We can't write trade deals the EU can.

It will be extremely interesting to see how many of them remain in Brussels after Brexit and how many of them will want to use the EU/UK negotiations to angle for a position at home. I do wonder how many of these "top negotiators" will want to screw the UK over during the A50 negotiations, when they might not even be able to hold down a job in Brussels come April 2019???

I must admit my musings lead me to the speculation that the UK might be in a better position to broker a deal with China, post A50 completion, than rEU/27

[TheOstrich]

This raises a number of interesting questions, not least of which is whether we are talking about Scottish country dancing here, Suff, and if so, do you wear the tartan?

[Suff]

Of course I wear Tartan, just not my family Tartan as it's truly horrible. But so do the Germans, French, English, Japanese and, basically, anyone who is a serious dancer around the world because the men wear Kilts to the Balls and most of the dances......