An odd day today, it is not warm, but it certainly isn’t cold. It is overcast and the Med has a North Sea look with waves that are much larger than usual, though there is no wind and few hits of a storm. The sea is an almost monochrome grey-blue and when I was riding along the paseo there was a sea mist which blended horizon and water and where the cold white breaking waves looked almost theatrical in their contrast with the surrounding drabness. It looked bleakly beautiful and there were isolated figures on the beach which gave a cinematographic look to my vistas from the saddle of the bike and it was easy to enjoy the visuals because there was no cold cost of being out in the bleakness, when it wasn’t really bleak!
As the restaurants and cafes are closed the emptiness of the streets echoes the deserted beach. On an inclement day one can imagine oneself back to the strict lockdown of March or April. As I typed that a solitary magpie swooped over the trees that I can see from my desk on the third floor. Is that an example of the pathetic fallacy: linking a harbinger of bad luck with lockdown? Or does it always have to be the weather? If it is the weather, then the slightly other-worldly climate at the moment is doing its bit!
Toni and I have been bewailing the lack of restaurants and the fact that we cannot go out for a menu del dia, I bring that up because of the vote by the Conservative Party in refusing to continue the provision of free school meals during the holidays.
I made the mistake of reading what some of the Nasty Party’s adherents said in justifying their decision and I was transported back to the unregenerate days of Dickensian blaming the poor for their situation and not wanting to mollycoddle them so that they would be too weak to make the effort to improve their position by their own efforts.
I have never, ever been a Conservative voter, and the last member of that benighted party for whom I had even a scintilla of respect was Iain Macleod (hated by the even further right wing of the Conservative Party as being “too clever by half”) and he had the good grace to die a month into Heath’s government so that he wasn’t further tainted by the steady descent to contemptibility that had started with Home. I think that my ‘respect’ for him was coloured by the fact that I was very young and he seemed like an intellectual threat to the comfortable leftish-wing politics that the young teenage me adopted.
So, in 2020 there is no character in the present government with even a shadow of the moral, intellectual and political nous of the late Iain Macleod and everything that they do and say increases my contempt for them. Where are the people with the moral standing (!) of a John Profumo (!) in this cabinet of Political Caligaris? The third-rate chancers that make up the U-turning incompetents that govern the UK make me ashamed to be British.
The USA, UK, Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, as well as many others around the world are forming a distasteful group of countries that seem more and more distant from any ideals of democracy and decency that I understand to be motivators for decent political government.
At least the people of the USA have the opportunity to dump Trump and return to some sort of joined-up thinking, whereas we have YEARS of Johnson and his rabble before he can be cast into the infamy of history.
How many people SO FAR have been killed by the incompetence of Johnson’s government? Given the Conservatives’ atrocious handling of the pandemic, what chance is there that the looming disaster of Brexit is going to be overseen with compassion, understanding and efficiency?
How many more hungry children will it take for Conservatives to act with simple humanity?
Look to the history of the Conservative Party for your answer.
