A range of rants

 

 

A double vaccinated member of my Catalan family has now contracted Covid and will have to self-isolate, emerging from this on the 22^nd of December, just in time for the Christmas Celebrations.  At the moment he has flu-like symptoms, and we are hoping that they do not develop any further, relying on the expectation that the vaccination will limit any serious consequences.

     What it does do is emphasise that the pandemic is nowhere near over, and we are still very much in the dark as far as any coherent view about what post-pandemic life may be, and when we might be experiencing it.

     At this moment in time, all our planned celebrations for the three days from Christmas Eve are still in place, though these same plans become more brittle with each passing day.

     In spite of the growing fears about the Omicron variant, there does not seem to be a great deal of concern about the progress of the pandemic, and the rules that are already in place do not seem to be widely followed. 

     For example, we are now supposed to show Covid vaccination certificates in restaurants, bars, gyms etc – the policy is, shall we say, being loosely applied.  Today in a restaurant we were not asked for our certificate, and I saw no one who came into the restaurant asked.

     If this laxity is indicative of the approach here, then it is only a matter of time before the pressing need for more taxing restrictions are brought in because of an exponential rise in infection.

     I count myself partly to blame because, until Toni mentioned it this evening, it didn’t even cross my mind that the regulations had not been followed.  Life goes on as normal, and one is easily seduced into forgetting the reality with which one is surrounded.

     I know that it is wrong for the government to expect members of the public to act as their surrogates in getting policy delivered, but it is in all our interests that the very reasonable precautions that should be taken, are taken.

     I resolve to show my certificate even if I am not asked for it, and that might provoke the right behaviour.  I shall be more vigilant in future.  In a future that looks increasingly bleak as the news of the spread of the Omicron variation looks unstoppable.

 

 

Yet again I ask myself what the Conservative Party has to do to get people to stop voting and supporting them!

     It is an exhausting job merely listing the scandals that Johnson and his rag bag government have racked up.

     Just in the last week or so we have had the revelations about the last year Christmas parties that were held (or not held) in 10 Downing Street, with Johnsons categorical (eventual) denials having all the force of the ‘do not tumble dry’ instruction on clothes (image courtesy of John Crace or Marina Hyde in the Guardian).  Basically, if Johnson says something it is a fairly secure rule of thumb that the exact opposite is true.  So, while the rest of the country was obeying the strict lockdown rules, No 10 was flouting them.  And now lying about them.

     Coupled with this is the “apology” for failings in the Grenville Tower disaster in the administration of building regulations.  Tell that to the dead.

     Today we heard graphic descriptions of the disorganized chaos in the Foreign Office with the deadhead Raab presiding over a dysfunctional and deadly, inefficient, badly led, disaster of a department.

     And the final and grotesque garnish to the vileness of the government is the revealing of the lies that Johnson and No 10 have talked about the evacuation of pets before people.  I am a staunch believer in the fact that people who do not care about animals, will care little for humans as well.  But people must come before pets, and if resources were diverted to help a pet sanctuary rather than help the people who aided the mission in Afghanistan AND that Johnson lied about his involvement, then surely disgust and repugnance is the only appropriate attitude to have towards him and the low life that supports him.

     And that lot is only what has been brought to us today!  It is exhausting despising the worthless chancers who rule us.  With Thatcher (whom I hated and continue to hate) I didn’t feel this drained and depleted by my loathing.  Thatcher was a person and not a cult.  Johnson is a populist with, as far as I can tell, not a shred of ‘ethos’ motivating his actions apart from his narcissistic self-regard.  He demeans the country, politics, and himself.  He is a disgrace – but he will not and indeed cannot see that.  To recognize his own fatal limitations will mean his instant evaporation.

     It will be instructive to see what happens to the Conservative majority in the next by-election.  If the Conservative Party senses that he has or will become a liability, they will be ruthless in their elimination of an obstacle to their continued grip on power.

     I can look forward to Johnson’s fall from grace (though he certainly did that a long, long time ago) but I shudder at the ‘slimy things with legs’ that will slither their way out of the sewer of sleaze and corruption that is the Conservative Party at the moment and try and shin their way up the greasy Tory donor money painted pole to power.

     God help us all!

Lost and Found

 

 

I thought, as you do, of using some apposite quotation from the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or that bit in Matthew of “rejoice, and be exceeding glad” to express my delight at being presented with my Lost White Notebook (the capital letters indicating the growing importance that I have placed on it while it was lost) to accompany my post swim cup of tea.  I had obviously left the book or dropped the book at or near my seat and it had been found and carefully put away by the catering staff.  “Great happiness!”  Though that is not the King James Version of the Bible, but rather King Duncan in Macbeth, and his joy has to be viewed with a certain degree of irony!

     And that is always the problem with quotations, or perhaps it is their delight – that they come with associations.  You detach them from their contexts at your peril.

     The Parable of the Prodigal Son ends with the father telling his disgruntled elder son, that his younger impoverished, wastrel brother, “was lost, and is found.”  Simple, precise, and beautiful.  Applying the ‘mere’ words to my lost notebook may be accurate, but a book of my scribbles being kept behind the counter in the swimming pool café, waiting for me to reclaim it, is hardly the stuff of moral instruction, and the spiritual baggage of the quotation overwhelms the occasion.  

 

 

 

 

 

     Similarly, with the ‘bit’ of Matthew.  The words are spoken just after Jesus has delivered the Beatitudes and he encourages his disciples and followers to accept the persecution that will follow acceptance of his doctrine as a sign of their being blessed.  Not just popping a small notebook back in the pocket that it must have fallen out of.

     At one time an ‘educated’ person would have been able to use images and language from the Bible and the Classics and have a reasonable expectation that his ‘educated’ listener would be able to follow his examples.

     Today, what is our generally shared pool of knowledge?  I would suggest that even with a parable as famous as The Prodigal Son, and even with the phrase being part of reasonably everyday English, few know any details of the story, or even that it comes from the Bible.

     When I was teaching and trying to justify (is that the right word) Milton’s use of heavy religious and Classical imagery, I would ask the class to think of a simile, to make one up, but to use a figure or event or product that they knew well, with the aim to get the simile accepted by the whole class.  So, for example, you could say, “Complete the following simile, ‘As famous as ………..’ filling in the space with the name of a person, a living person, whom everybody in the class would know.”  The students usually forgot that I was in the class too, and their favourite and very famous singers or football players or television stars, did not sometimes figure on my list of the famous, which the kids used to call ‘foul’ to and say that to get someone even I must know would be impossible!  Which was part of the point that I was making.

     It was a useful exercise to show that there were various spheres of “You must have heard of him/her” where not knowing the “famous” person by a section of the class was greeted with astonishment.

 

 

  

 I also used the expression, “As faithful as Ruth.”  Not only had most of the classes never heard of the expression, they also did not know that there was a book of the bible called Ruth and they knew nothing about the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz.

     Of course, you could say that my generation of baby boomers was the last to be brought up on a diet of significant and generally accepted Great Literature, with poems from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury featuring heavily.  In my first year in Secondary School, we read from a slim volume called Men and Gods which gave brief and readable versions of some of the more famous Greek and Roman myths, giving us a fairly easy was in to hearing some of the Classical names that would feature in the literature that we would be presented with as we progressed through school.

     The odious Johnson peppers his discourse with references to the Classics, throwing a few well-worn Latin tags into his so-called conversation to give the impression of timeless erudition.  But he hides behind the effect, he does not use Classicism to elucidate but rather to intimidate.  He aims for the same admiration that right-wing thugs gave to Enoch Powell, 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

when they vaunted his linguistic ability and his ability to read Latin and Greek as a way of giving themselves some reflected kudos from his academic reputation and using his assumed intellectual superiority to justify their base behaviour.

     A shared body of knowledge is only useful if it makes communication easier, otherwise it becomes a way of excluding and reinforces exclusivity.

     So, what about the expression of my glee at finding something that was lost?  Famous quotations come ‘ready-made’, but they come with associations that are rarely exactly to the point that you are trying to make.

     The only solution, of course, is to write your own!

    

If only it was a comedy!

 

 

 

 

 

  

In the interests of truth and fairness I need to set the record straight.

     I thought, simpleton as I was, that Johnson might have had the good grace to let Paterson know that he was dumping him before it was generally known.  But no, the serial paid lobbyist MP, found out by telephone call from a BBC journalist while in a supermarket.  Of course, Johnson did not give him a head’s up, that would have shown concern for “a friend and colleague of mine for decades” and that is totally foreign to his narcissistic nature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

     I also thought that there might have been a little bit of negotiation to make the resignation happen smoothly with the promise of some honorific goodie some vague time in the future, but that too was crediting Johnson with a degree of strategy of which he is incapable.  Much better to just do it and the hell with the consequences – after all, that has served Johnson well in all the past fiascos.

     As a postscript to that paragraph, I have now read in the paper that No 10 does not rule out a peerage for the serial paid lobbyist ex-MP.  Who knows what that means?

     In a piece in the Guardian (4/11/21) by Kevin Rawlinson, he itemises Johnson’s U-turns writing that “a conservative count gives more than 30 often panicked policy changes since the 2019 general election.”  It makes sobering reading.  so, while urging you to read the original article in The Guardian, I'll list them:

 

 

 

'Ignore Covid' to national lockdown

Mass community testing

Bereavement scheme

Visa surcharge

Proxy voting

Rashford's free school meals campaign

NHS app

Reopening primary schools

Face coverings in shops

Huawei ban

Local contact tracers

Exam results in England

Face masks in schools

Eviction ban

England's second lockdown

Furlough scheme extension

Rashford's free school meals campaign - again

Cancelling Christmas

Lockdown a day after opening schools

Health secretary's resignation

Johnson and Sunak self-isolating

Foreign aid spending

Taking the knee

Air passenger quarantine

The Northern Ireland protocol

Critical worker pingdemic

Afghan guards

Natikonal insurance rises

Vaccine passports

Foreign lorry drivers

Sewage

Parliamentary standards and corruption

 

 

     How anyone can have faith in such a dithering incompetent like Johnson, defies belief.

     However, his abortive attempt to scrap the parliamentary standards system might point to his concern about what revelations and condemnations might result from the various financial irregularities, most pressingly in the refurbishment of his flat, issued by the very body he tried to abolish.  Junking democracy to safeguard his own selfish interests does seem a convincing explanation for the imposition of a three-line whip for something that was pretty self-evidently corrupt.

     Quite aside from party politics, the stench of corruption in the Conservative Party, is corrosive.  It taints the whole of political life, which is why it is essential that Johnson and the Conservative Party take responsibility for what the Conservative Party has done, apologise for the damage done and sack the persons responsible for the chaotic fiasco.

     The Daily Mail, in an otherwise scathing review of the despicable actions of Conservative MPs over the Paterson vote, tried to broaden the condemnation to all MPs.  That, in this instance is not fair, the only MPs who voted in favour of the abolition were Conservatives (with 1 DUP MP, quelle surprise!) they were not supported by any of the other parties.  The Conservatives own this particular piece of squalor.

     For me the viciously farcical air of the whole sordid episode is summed up in the story of Conservative MP Angela Richardson.  She was the parliamentary private secretary to Goblin Gove.  She abstained from voting in favour of the transparently corrupt motion and, on Wednesday evening she was duly sacked from her parliamentary private secretary post.  But 12 hours (sic) is a long time in politics, especially Conservative “politics”, and so by Thursday morning she had been reinstated in her job. 

     ‘Farce’ is too stable-sounding a term for what actually went on!