Concerned? Write!

 

 

I am determined to write something which related to my next book.  I have written notes and sketched out possible content, but I haven’t formally written a passage which could be part of the finished product.  I feel that I am at the stage where the writing of anything is better than writing nothing, just to get me going.  I do realize that what I write today may well be discarded in the future, but that junked writing is usually a way of forming my literary path forward to what I regard as a satisfactory conclusion.

     What makes the writing more difficult is that I am attempting to use a central theme as the unifying element in a book that will be composed of a number of discrete parts.  If it is not to be too ‘bitty’ then the theme will have to play a major role in the cement keeping the whole thing together.

     I will be able to work on the detail of the different parts, but they will only be effective if I can unite them in a way that is not too forced.

     Any writing I do tonight, will be a way of keeping my mind off what is happening (or perhaps not happening) in a certain dinner party in Brussels where one of the politicians in whom I have no trust whatsoever is seeing himself as a sort of White Knight bravely jousting his way in the savage lair of the EU and staunchly defending the national freedoms that he has done so much to imperil!   

     I truly believe that Johnson is coward enough to risk a no-deal outcome rather than get a deal which, while it might be good (or at least better than no deal) for the country would do little for his prestige and life in the Conservative party.  But, sufficient unto the day and all that, let’s wait (again) to see what happens.  But I remain pessimistic and, let’s face it, I have the evidence of the last four and a half years to justify depression when I see Conservative politicians going to Europe to do their thing!

 

The swimming pool was substantially emptier today now that the Puente is over and people are back to work.  I managed to do my entire swim in a lane to myself, so that always starts me off in a good mood for the day.

 

I am hearing more people express qualified doubts about early acceptance of the vaccines.  The rumour mills are working overtime and I have already heard a number of what I think are unsubstantiated claims of reactions to the drugs.  Considering how few have actually been vaccinated, it is truly remarkable how quickly people are speaking authoritatively about them.  I am still, however, staunchly in the early adopter camp.  All I need now is someone somewhere to offer me a jab.

     At present I am not clear about how Spain and Catalonia are going to roll out the vaccinations, but I am determined not to be disappointed if I get mine sometime in April.

     I have also noted that some experts are saying that we should get used to the wearing of masks for virtually the whole of next year, with next winter being a time when we will need to be especially careful, no matter who has had the vaccine.  An important point was made by one expert who said that being vaccinated did not meant that the individual was incapable of spreading the virus to others, only that the person would be unlikely to suffer the effects of the virus personally. 

     This is going to be a very difficult message to get across, as it is much more likely that people will consider themselves immune as soon as they are injected and make the assumption that they are safe, when they most assuredly are not.

     Well, if nothing else, it will give me the opportunity to purchase a daffodil mask that I will wear on St David’s Day, March 1^st, 2021!

 

We exist too, Mr Johnson!

 

 

 

 

 

Only a two-faced lazy chancer like Johnson could appeal to “the power of sweet reason” to get a Brexit agreement “over the line” without apparent recognition of irony.  This is because there is no real link between what comes out of his mouth and any discernible link to what might be loosely termed “reality” in the Conservative dystopia that passes for politics nowadays.

     “Reason” is the very last thing that has driven the Brexiteer Vandals, they have behaved like berserkers drunk on their intoxicating brew of bigoted self-interest and blind adherence to a twisted ideology of purist Brexit where mere reality is relegated to a lowly, nay insignificant place in what passes for their thinking.

     Given Johnson’s morbid narcissism it is impossible to tell whether his assessment of a Brexit agreement as “looking very, very difficult at the moment” is yet another of his macho taunts to the EU showing that he can play the poker hand with steely nerves, or whether he is really preparing us for the fact that we are not actually going to get an agreement as all.

     The inherent contradictions (or lies as it might be fairer to call them) in the Brexiteers’ position have always been there.  The questions that are the sticking points today have been the areas of confusion from the start, and in the years that the Brexiteers have had to make their plans clear in how they were going to work, they have done virtually nothing, except talk incoherent, self-defeating nonsense.  They have no ideas about how to get what they want (when they actually know what it is that they want) except through tantrums and unreasonable demands.

     And in the middle (sometimes, when he can be bothered) is the joke of a man who wears the title of prime minister. 

 

Johnson must know that he is in a no-win situation.  To gain the agreement of the rabid Brexiteers in the Conservative party, he will lose the majority of the ‘moderate’ (whatever that means in Conservatism nowadays) majority that makes up the Parliamentary party.  If he gets anything like a reasonable (whatever that means in terms of Brexit nowadays) agreement, he will have the right-wingers frothing at the mouth.  Whatever he manages to get from a reasonable agreement to a full repudiation of Brexit to a no-agreement Brexit, he is going to be pilloried.

     You might say, with some justice, that he fully deserves to be attacked en mass; the only thing that drove him to espouse the Brexit ‘idea’ was naked cynicism wrapped in all-devouring ambition.  Public service and the country didn’t get a look in.  So, we could stand back and watch the blood bath and say, “jolly good riddance!”

     Except we can’t.  As John Donne stubbornly reminds us, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent” – the irony of the word ‘continent’ being used when you  think about Brexit is tellingly ironic!   

     Although Johnson doesn’t give a damn about us, the ordinary people, we cannot share his wealthy distain for the realities of lived life, we are directly affected by his decisions and the decisions of his party.  Johnson may be concerned with his self-image and be concerned about how posterity sees him; we have to live in the world and country that he is making.  His wealth largely insulates him from the financial and practical effects of his policies: he is not concerned about the problems of being able to live, he is more concerned with how he appears.

     When all is said and done, I simply do not trust Johnson.  I don’t trust him as a politician and I don’t trust him as a person.  He lacks morality.  He is a liar.  He is a deceiver.  He is an opportunist.  And he is deciding my future.

     It is a sad and almost tragic thing to say, but I do put my trust in one aspect of Johnson’s modus vivendi, he is a betrayer.  He betrays because, as one commentator put it, he lives in the moment and the past is not of any real concern to him.

     And that is our hope!  Johnson will produce an agreement that goes back on virtually everything that he has said because that is what he does!

     It’s a frail hope, but I think it is the only one that we have because “sweet reason” left the room many years ago.

 

Today has been, continues to be, cold.  13c.  It rained briefly last night, but today we have had fluffy clouds with patches of blue – not much actual sunshine, but no rain.

     The weather is important because today is a holiday and this time (as opposed to the weekend) people from outside Castelldefels can legally come and walk along the paseo.  It is an opportunity for bars and restaurants to try and get some cash flow before Christmas.  We went to a restaurant, one of our usual haunts, and it was quite full (with the 50% limit), there were certainly people around and yesterday there were television pictures of queues of people waiting to go into shopping centres to get their Christmas gifts organized.

     Which begs the question of what people are going to do during the holiday period.  As I have said before, I think that the next month or so is going to be critical in the way that the pandemic pans out.  If people regard Christmas as a time to be laxer than they already are, then the middle of January will show a massive jump in infections.

     Realistically people are not going to be vaccinated until the middle of next year.  I think that I may be lucky if I manage to be vaccinated by April, as I manage to tick a few boxes for the early application of the needle!  This means that we will be well into the summer of next year before the majority of the population have had their double injections.

     But what I am hearing are sighs of relief that a vaccine, or series of vaccines, are being rolled out and that the horrors of the pandemic are numbered.  Which they are not.  We are not safe until everyone is safe and we have been told by numerous authorities that Covid is a virus that is not going to be eradicated and is something that we are going to have to live with.  For ever.  That hard truth has not found its way into many consciousnesses.  And that means more death.

 

On a different topic entirely.  I am trying to find out how to treat the rather exotic book cover that I talked about yesterday.  This cover is made of suede and is falling to pieces.  I am not sure what to apply to the cover to preserve it.  Would leather cream or polish do anything?  Any thoughts gratefully received!

 

 

 

 

Oh god, not him!

 

 

 

There is surely nothing more engineered to foster confidence about the Brexit talks than to see the charlatan Gove (the love child of a defrocked pixie and a gobby goblin) skuttling his elven way to Brussels to – to do what exactly?  To add his five pennyworths of facile, slimy lies to the morass of doublespeak that is the British ‘position’ in what should be negotiations?   

     God help us all when that chubby cheeked cheat speaks for Britain!  Still, I suppose Gove can use his White Queen trick of believing five impossible things before breakfast to encourage his verbiage (conveniently forgetting his previous belief that Johnson was supremely unfit to become prime minister) and marching forward to defend the indefensible.

     I felt physically sick when, on the news this evening, I heard that the British Government had offered up as a bargaining chip to bring the discussion to a ‘satisfactory’ conclusion the offer not to behave illegally!  How jolly decent of them because, of course, an Englishman’s word is his bond, unless it isn’t.   

     How the EU side can stop themselves from treating the shambles of the British position with anything other than contempt, I really do not know.

    

Let’s face it, at this stage of the “Never ending, stor-ree!” (just thought that I would throw in a reference to the true earworm that music is) the only thing motivating the British side is not, emphatically not, Britain.  Our negotiators couldn’t give a toss for the country and the bulk of the people in it.  Fishermen, the population of Northern Ireland, businesses, imports and exports, areas of deprivation, they have all been thrown off the bus – you know the one that the liars’ liar Johnson paints for recreation – and the members of Johnson’s third or fourth rate cabinet merely look to their wealth as they crunch over the bones of the suckers who ever thought that they might be of concern to them.

     The Conservative Party, as we are regularly told, is one of the most successful political parties in the western world, and it has got its power and its longevity by a callous disregard for anything other than its own survival.  If they do good, like the 1944 Education Act, it is almost by mistake, and they certainly did not reward the architect of that act, RAB Butler with leadership of the party when the time came to choose.

     Johnson, the Man Who Would Be Prime Minister, does not have the intellectual or moral worth to be able to sustain the role.  He has got to where he is today by systematically lying and showing utter disregard to anyone and anything other than himself and his ambition.

     His empty rhetoric way wow blue rinsed ladies of various Conservative Associations, but it doesn’t work when practical things have to be decided on the basis of that rhetoric.  Johnson has no interest in the rules and regulations that govern institutions, he is, as virtually everyone has pointed out, not a details man.  Unfortunately (for us) he has become prime minister at a time when a details man is exactly what is needed.  Rhetoric kills – look at the number of Covid deaths in the UK.  Rhetoric destroys – look at industry still desperately asking the government for leadership and information about what is going to happen in a few weeks’ time.

     “Get Brexit Done!” – the perfect meaningless jingle for Johnson, allowing him to sound dynamic while the empty platitude played well with people who wanted simplicity in an almost terminally complex situation.

     Now we are in the final days when all the detail that Johnson hates so much is everything.  Rhetoric has to be written down in legalistic words where there is no wriggle room for gaudy metaphor and inept simile.

     Johnson’s shoddy, corrupt government now has come to the crux of negotiations.  Real things have to be decided and the only, the absolutely only (I know that is tautology, but I feel it fits here) thing that is motivating Johnson is what he can get away with.

     He will, as he always has done in the past, junk anything and anyone to get what he wants.  His situation is desperate: No Deal will be a financial disaster, and even his most stupefied followers will have to own and admit it eventually; a thin deal will please nobody as everyone will feel hard done by; a generous deal will be regarded by the Brexit fanatics as an act of treason.  There is nothing that Johnson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy everybody.  Perhaps there is nothing that Jonson can get out of Brussels that is going to satisfy anybody.  And he is going to have to own it.  And he will not be able to do that.

     I can imagine somebody doing the sums (Johnson is far too lazy to do them himself, and besides he doesn’t really know who is in his party anyway) and trying to work out which deal would be the less disastrous.  And the disaster will not be related to the people of Britain it will be directly linked to the fortunes of the Conservative Party.  Politics, not logic or faith or economics or fairness or justice, is going to determine what we get from the “oven ready” deal that has taken four long years to cook.

     And unless Johnson uses the “Long Covid Symptoms” to fabricate himself a get out of parliament card, then he is going to have to own the disaster of his making in years more of his narcissistic premiership, when we will continue to pay the price.

 

I put that bad feeling that you have just read down to the fact that I got to the swimming pool an hour early this morning.  Today was ¡Fiesta! and tomorrow will be an extra day of holiday so instead of opening at 7 am it will open at 8.  An extra hour in bed?  Not really, I am programmed to get up, or at least get ready to get up, at 6.15 am, and if I say in bed longer I feel that I am cheating and I do not get any real benefit.  It is easier to get up at the normal time and do neglected housework to make the time feel valuable, and to give myself a warm glow of self-satisfaction!

     But today I forgot about the holiday and so I had to come back home and do neglected housework etc etc and complete the Guardian Quick Crossword, rather than fill in a single clue and then leave it for later after the swim.

 

 [Yes, I know this image is not upright, but it's too late and I'm too tired to re-jig it]

My catalogue raisonné continues apace with items of little value, but some interest, filling the pages.  Compiling the catalogue is forcing me to look again at some things that I have ignored for years.  For example, I have decided to list a copy of The Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde.  This is a volume printed in 1912 with a soft brown suede cover stamped with an interesting Art Nouveau flower design and with the title stamped in gold.  It is not particularly valuable, but it was bought by my father to give to my aunt who in turn gave it to me a quarter of a century later after my father’s death. 

     The suede is rotting and has an unpleasant feel to it, the binding is unravelling, the pages yellowing – and yet, it is important to me.  There is always something about reading the actual pages that people important to you have read before you, whose hands have held the volume in the way that you are holding it.

     Yes, I realize that this is Romantic nonsense, but it doesn’t make the oddly satisfying feeling I have when I handle the book any less real to me.

     A worthy addition to the catalogue!  And it takes my mind off other things.