UNKITED NATIONS DAY!

The count-down has begun! My bus pass is but 365 days away!

We have recovered from the disaster of the missed plane and we are assuming that our three intrepid travellers are already in Bristol Airport leaving a comfortable five hours before their flight leaves!

So, the major event to celebrate United Nations Day will be a drive down and back again from Reus Airport. O Joy!

At least the weather has gone back to normal after the few days of torrential rain that we suffered and the morning sun is being diffused through gauzy clouds. Quite right too!

We have now made an executive decision that the Club Marítimo is going to be the venue for the United Nations Day meal and we will worry about getting Louise up and down the curved flight of stairs when we have to deal with the situation. I hope that at least some of us manage to retain a degree of sobriety so that Louise’s descent from the repast is not of a bouncingly vertical manner.

The peace of my unaccustomed lie-in this morning was rudely broken by the raucous ringing of the phone and then a rendition of ‘Happy Birthday’ that would have had Stockhausen curling his little toes with excited pleasure! You’ve guessed: it was Clarrie singing from far away Reading.

I might add that for the first time in just less than sixty years I have not had a single solitary United Nations Day card. The only one was a computer generated e-mail from TEFL.net which is an employment agency which constantly sends me details of poorly paid TEFL jobs in the more obscure parts of the Spanish peninsular.

Toni, shamed in action, is, even as I type, trying to send me an electronic card – and failing to do so.

I have not yet gone down to the post box, but the very wonderful British Post Office has ensured that, even were people to send, their missives would be sure to be piled up somewhere in an obscure sorting office beyond the ken of man.

I must say that I regard Post Office Workers in much the same way that I think of Fire Fighters – people who have great public sympathy as the valiant people who struggle to give a true public service. If I was a child, that is what I would still be thinking. But I am no longer a child and I have put away such childish thoughts. I know full well that both ‘professions’ are stuffed with what are collectively referred to as ‘Spanish Practices’ – in other words they have retained and developed the approach to work that was seen at its most disgusting in the Surrealistic attitude to negotiation that characterized the attitude of The Print Workers Union.

I want no one to think as I start out on my sixth decade that I have become an honorary member of the Disgusted of Tonbridge Wells Brigade and lost sight of my ‘if he is not a socialist before he is twenty he has no heart’ and am now comfortably in the ‘if he is a socialist after twenty he has not head’ attitude.

My mother (the most intelligent of the three of us as she took every opportunity to inform us) was a follower of Owens’s celebrated remarks on the dissolution of a partnership, “All the world art queer save thee and me; and even thou art a little queer.” She had a wary mistrust of most people and a distinct mistrust of husband and son!
My father was more a follower of Beckett in his dismissal of the human race as “bloody ignorant apes” and he particularly blamed the working class for constantly “fouling their nest” as he put it.

It is hardly surprising therefore that my favourite concept is ‘irony’ – and I am aware that that in itself could be an example of the very concept I like!

I should, I suppose be the acme of cynicism – but Saint Oscar’s wit shames me from espousing so negative a philosophy.

But I couldn’t be so woolly a liberal as to watch, for example, the destruction of the coal industry during the Miners’ Strike (led by that odious rat Scargill) with misty eyed romanticism and a deluded middle class belief that the noble working class (especially the iconic Miners) could not possibly be wrong. I found the violence on both sides repulsive; the politics nauseating and the human cost harrowing.

I did contribute to the Miners’ Fund – who wouldn’t, there was human suffering and misery whatever the rights and wrongs of the dispute; but I resented the fact that it had happened and that Thatcher (why, o why is that woman still alive when I have her candle representation ready and waiting to be burnt on the occasion of her long and eagerly awaited death) was handed a ‘victory’ on a plate by her victims. The phrase ‘lions led by donkeys’ never seemed to apposite.

So jobs that seemed so romantic to a child do not (or should not) give those who do them the right to protect themselves by practises that, in the cold light of day are patently absurd and unjustifiable. I wonder if either of the ‘professions’ I have mentioned would like to see their ‘conditions of service’ fully explained to an incredulous public? I think not.

And what I have said goes for the management too, of course. The ‘bonus culture’ of the astonishingly arrogant financial community is only the tip of the iceberg of selfishness which flies in the face of reason but is all too easy to explain in terms of callous self interest.

Those previous paragraphs are the result of not going out last night to celebrate Paul’s elevation to the educational purple. There is obviously a high linguistic price to be paid for enforced sobriety.

Perhaps tonight will make up for it, and tomorrow I will be all sweetness and light!

Perhaps.