It actually had the temerity to rain a few drops when I was in the swimming pool, though the weather now is not marked different from the last few days when it has been hot in a way that is not usual for this time of year. August is traditionally a time of vague disappointment, when the weather is more variable than one remembers from previous years, ironically, even though one expects to be dissatisfied: Schrodinger’s expectations!
At the moment we only have two fans working in the living room (out of a possible three) as a desperate attempt to mitigate the heat and since we don’t have air conditioning there is little else that we can do to make the living temperature well, liveable.
There is something about the quality of heat this year that hasn’t been present in past years and if this is a harbinger of what we can expect as the norm for the summer in future years then we are going to have to do something different to cope with the temperatures.
In a country that has hot and very hot summers and generally mildish winters, there is no talk of hosepipe bans and, in spite of the hot weather continuing for months, there is not talk of proclaiming a drought. Whereas in the UK, the situation seems to have reached a crisis point. Again.
Trump sneered that the FBI raid on his Floridian swamp was turning the USA in to one of the “shitehole” “third world countries” that he has so often dismissed with contempt in the past as a condescending image to cover his own criminality and the eventual, glacial, movement of the institutions of justice finally catching up with him. His images, as always, are absurd and insulting, but when I look at the situation of the UK then there appears to be an element of truth in the first world status slowly ebbing away.
With twelve years of Tory misrule and the callous cutting of health, welfare, education and everything else the grasping Conservatives can get their dirty mitts on, the stories that one hears are more suited to a developing country than one of the richest in the world.
The position of health services in the USA has always been something that has been beyond the comprehension of Western European nations, who generally do not regard providing health care for their citizens as being akin to rabid Communism. Many Americans are frightened of ill health because of the financial penalties that treatment will entail. The concept of healthcare free at the point of need is something far beyond the imagination of many American voters who see such a process as rampant Socialism and a denial of the American Way.
In the UK, the NHS is something in which we can take a justified pride, but a Health Service that has been hollowed out by 12 years of cuts and austerity and one that has been put under almost intolerable strain by dealing with Covid is struggling to cope and, after the last 12 years of Tory Misrule who could possibly believe that the “NHS is safe in our (Tory) hands”? Such a quotation from a past (and well hated Tory premier) seems like a sick joke. Private healthcare is rejoicing in the boost that 12 years of Tory Misrule have given them – as well, of course as the illegal boost to their funds by the corruption of the crooked Tory crony profiteers who milked us in the procurement process geared towards Conservative chums.
The provision of NHS dental care is a disgrace with whole swathes of the country described as “dental deserts” where 80% of dentists are no longer taking any new patients. The stories of people travelling for hours to get to any NHS provider, is one of shame.
Someone once told me that the worth of a country is found in the way that it treats the disadvantaged, the criminal and the sick. If we use those criteria to judge the present state of Britain then perhaps we are nearer to a third world (in itself that is a condescending term) country than one that uses its wealthy status to ensure that there is provision for all.
Inequality is rampant in Britain, crystalized by the grotesquery of a chancer like Johnson being (still) Prime Minister, and is unlikely to be mitigated by the lying equivocator lined up to take over, the woman who John Crace in the Guardian characterised as having grown up in “grinding middle class poverty” with her professor father and her sinkhole school only just managing to squeek her into Oxford.
Nothing that either of the “candidates” have said to the Neanderthals that are going to elect one or other of them, show a concern for the realities of the situation that the majority of the country is experiencing and is indeed dreading in the near wintery future. They are mired in the reality that allows such creatures as Rees-Mogg to be in government. They, like the Republican Party in the USA are now far to the right of the general electorate, but Conservative parties are adroit in the manipulation of the processes of power, in pushing institutions to their will, of gerrymandering and obfuscating in plain sight, while their tools in the right wing press present a twisted version of reality to maintain power and wealth in the hands of the very, very, few.
