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.

 

 

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 24 – Wednesday in Holy Week, 8th APRIL

 

I realise that, with all my bluff optimism, I have been affected by the lockdown!  In the poem that I wrote yesterday (smrnewpoems.blogspot.com) I actually questioned, even if rhetorically, the value of sunbathing!

     It is shocking to have to confront a possible breakdown in your worldview that can contemplate something as self-loathing as a negative approach to the appreciation of the nearest star!  It is certainly a wake up call to reassess my attitude and determine to be more positive in the future.  The idea of getting to June and July and behaving like a troglodyte is entirely unacceptable.

     If something as fundamental to my view of life is capable of mutability, then it makes me wonder what other, more subtle changes there have been in this period of self-isolation.  It would argue a self-deluding insensitivity to say that one can remain entirely stable when the world appears to be changing around you.

     The irony, of course, is that the micro world of self-isolation is unchanging and stable.  The continuing horrific catalogue of death and infection is all around us, but not part of the life that we are leading.  It is as if we are living in some sort of medieval fort with a water filled trench around us: part of our surroundings, but separated from them.

     Unlike some others, I have been entirely unable to wean myself from the news.  My addiction to the Internet radio, and more specifically Radio 4 is total.  It is at times like this that the Conservatives detestation of the BBC becomes not only partisan, but also self-defeating.  At times of National Crisis we united around the BBC as a voice of and to the Nation.  I certainly do not look towards the Conservatives and their slavish news lap dogs to give me a sense of what the Nation is thinking or feeling.

     And The Guardian.  As a life-long Guardian reader (with a brief fall from grace and adherence to The Independent) I now read it on my mobile phone with an intensity that goes beyond belief.  And may I make a specific call out for the writing of John Crace, a columnist of rare wit and perception.  His political sketches have been part of the reason that I have been able to maintain my sweetness and equilibrium during the past few years where Brexit and the bloody Conservatives have convinced me that I am living in a society where the dominant ideology is the death-wish!

My early morning routine is now becoming more and more established: set Moppy (don’t blame me, the app demands that you call your robot cleaner something) off on her hoovering circuit; make my cup of tea (English breakfast and Earl Grey) and have the World’s Most Expensive Augmented Muesli (at least I have stopped adding Smarties to it) with fat-free milk; do the Guardian Quick Crossword (with light cheating); change Moppy to her mopping sequence; go for my pool circuits.  And a chunk of the day is gone!  Which is a clear exemplification of the work expanding to match the time available!

     I do miss my daily early morning swim and I can’t wait to get back to that part of my routine, because that morning start include my first writing of the day when I sit in the café or outside having my post-swim cup of tea.  Ah!  How life used to be!

Just back from the open kitchen window where at 8.00 pm our time, we applaud the front-line workers who are keeping our society going.

     Talking of health workers and their battle against the virus: the British Prime Minister now in Intensive Care.  As I said yesterday, I wish him better health and strength to his family – and he should resign.  Now.  At once.

     The Prime Minister’s bravado a while ago where he was joking about his meeting Covid-19 positive people and shaking hands with them; his visible inability to maintain social distancing when his government was promoting it as essential, now appear to be a foolhardy, self-indulgent imposition on health services that are overstretched.   

     I might also add, that the Prime Minister’s inability to give clear indications of who actually has ultimate power in government is a dereliction of duty.   

     chocolate, retribution, judgement, ineptitude, Throughout his career he has been first and foremost a second-rate, shoddy, narcissistic, journalistic liar and, while I have sympathy for his present state of health, I have none for his political.  We deserve better than him.  Though with the cabinet of freaks that he has accumulated, god alone knows who (or in the case of Gove, what) might take his place.

     So far the Conservatives’ management of the Covid-19 crisis has been fatally inept.  How many unnecessary deaths is it going to take before the people of Britain demand the reckoning that should come sooner rather than later?

Determined not to end this post on a sour note, I can report that we were able to buy chocolate in the last shop and you can be assured that my writing has been sweetened by the confectionary. 

     So just imagine what it would have been like without!