Comfort too late?

I do like my basic comforts, and one of those involves sitting on something more giving than hard metal springs.

     I do admit that I am not good at looking after certain things, and those include garden/beach chairs.  My reasoning is that they are designed to be used in the garden and on the beach and therefore they should survive both those environments without my having to give them any special treatment.  

     So, they are used from about May-sih to October-ish and then I ignore them.  Amazingly I did make the supreme effort to put my chair under the ‘eves’ of my study windows giving out onto the terrace on the third floor, to allow a certain degree of protection from the elements, but from then onwards the chair had to fend for itself though the winter and early spring months until the weather was clement enough to consider sitting out in the sand-filled sea breezes of the start of the tourist season.

     While the metal construction of the chair survived well, the cushioned cover did not fare at all well and it assumed the appearance of fragile, agèd parchment and had the same proclivities to rend and tear.  Which it did.

     Now, I have a fairly high I-couldn’t-give-a-shit approach to meaningless appearances and, in spite of the fact that I can feel and hear my mother’s refrain of “I was ashamed when you . . .” when taking a tatty chair to the beach, I can generally ignore pitying eyes and anyway I cover things up with a very large beach towel.

     It is when the ‘parchment’ material starts powdering and leaving a residue on newly browned flesh that one feels that a certain limit has been reached.  And, when every time the cushioned seating is adjusted, and a part of it comes off in one’s hand, one feels that the time for a replacement it nigh.

     It is, however, towards the end of the season, and beach accoutrements have been put away and shelves cleared for the over-kill of merchandise for Halloween, so that asking for a replacement cushion is looked on as a slightly odd request at this time of the year.

     We intend to go to the beach this morning and I decided yesterday that I would take off the old broken cushion to force myself to do a pilgrimage around the Stations of the Chinese Superstores to find a replacement.

     We are constantly urged to support local shops, and we do try and do that.  But our experiences of trying to be supportive have been, to put it mildly, mixed. 

      I seem to remember shopping when I was younger and if the shop that you were in was unable to supply something they would either say, “We can order that for you and have it in for next week,” or “Why don’t you try so and so’s, they might have it there.”  We rarely find this level of basic service, and I have to say that the level of service in the Chinese Superstores is variable as well (usually in direct inverse relationship to how well or how badly they speak Spanish) but the stuff you want is usually there.  It may take some finding, but somewhere, it lurks waiting for your eyes to light up in recognition.

     It took me three stores to find something that would work, and fit, but find it I did, and so I will blend-in in bland uniformity rather than stand out in indigent tatters.

     On a beach that, in our locality, is gratifyingly empty nowadays, my ‘new’ chair will have an audience of exactly one, my partner.  

     But, as my mother would undoubtedly add, “That doesn’t make a difference.  You’ve done the proper thing!”

     Dead parents are stern masters! 

I don't want to play that game!

 

 

 

 

 

 

What would I wait in a three-mile queue for?

     This is one of the emptiest parlour games ever invented, because the answer is ‘absolutely nothing’!  OK, you can re-work things and say that if it was a matter of life and death, or that there were untold riches at the end of the wait for the taking, but for anything else?  No, I can think of nothing.  At least nothing real and achievable!

     And yet, thousands, tens – no, hundreds of thousands of my fellow countrymen, with a sprinkling of foreigners, are joining the queue to file past the coffin of a ninety-six-year-old woman.  A woman with no real accomplishments to her name, apart from her longevity and an ability for small talk honed to perfection over decades of vacuous ‘service’.

      

 

 

 

On the other hand, I do understand that some people feel a real sense of personal loss and that by queueing and paying their respects they are honouring a debt owed to a lady who devoted herself to her people,  I also understand that people feel that this moment is an historic one and that they are able to link themselves to a unique, unrepeatable moment in our national experience by actually being there.  A feeling of linking oneself to something almost immeasurably greater.

     You can tell that I am going through the motions and trying to think myself into the position of someone who makes the decision to queue for perhaps thirty hours for a distanced moment with the coffined corpse of a dead Queen.  And I’m failing miserably.

      In the same way I fail to understand the people who voted for Trump or continue to ‘believe’ the lie of the lost election; or the people who voted for Johnson and continued to vote for him long after it was obvious that he was singularly unsuited for any sort of public service.

     I can understand people voting for self-aggrandisement and voting for the party that seems to offer the best protection for their interests, no matter how unfair it might be.  I remember I once had a lapel badge that had “VOTE TORY” in the centre, and it drew quizzical glances because I was not known for my Conservative sympathies!  It was only when those surprised people drew a little closer and saw the writing around the central ‘message’ that things became clearer: “Young and stupid?  Old and selfish?”  A gross simplification I know, but it does point to lack of education and selfishness at least playing some part in the way that the great questions of our time have been ‘resolved’!

 

 

 

      

 

 

    Brexit is the perfect example of how the same badge could be used and the word “Brexit” substituted for “Tory”!

     But that is not the whole explanation.  Decent people voted for Brexit and are still (in spite of the evidence to the contrary) backing it.  I have heard defenders of “the greatest act of self-harm in our history” passionately asserting that it has worked and that things are better.  And this is not simply the idiocy of, for example, the Brexit Blinded MP for Dover blaming the French for taking us at our word and treating us like a ‘third’ country after we withdrew to become a ‘third’ country – it is more a sort of wilful determination to make the best of what is having a ‘few teething problems’ but, as usual, we will pull through: cue, Churchill speeches, rousing music and many references to the Second World War and the Blitz!

     I suppose, when you come down to it, all forms of policy and government are precarious balancing acts, which only work because of the faith and belief of the people who are watching and want the act to work.

     Johnson has been the single most destructive person in recent times to threaten the whole edifice of the Way Things Are Done by ignoring the “Good Chaps” system of administration, where leeway is given on the assumption that people will do the right thing, rather than having to act on a strict system of rules, laws, and regulations to limit behaviour.  The problem is, when you have a buffoon and narcissist as leader then all those “unwritten” (but powerful) rules do not exist if they get in his way, and then the whole flummery edifice comes tumbling down.  And even with him gone the so-called Tory Party de nos jours seems to have deserted any ethical basis for their action and is blithely following the wrecking strategy of the former (disgraced) prime minister and using their elected majority to rewrite or ignore any troubling laws that might get in their way – and they are supported by?  Well, hardly a majority of the country because they were not elected by a majority after the farce of the First Past The Post system, we have to regulated democracy into a basic two-party state – but I am wandering and digressing and allowing my despair about the present situation in my country to pull my writing into too many directions!

     What I do feel is that this (new prime minister, new monarch) could be a tipping point, where the tinsel of ceremony which covers the way that we are governed, begins to be seen as the superficial window dressing that it is and, as hunger and deprivation begin to hurt swathes of the population this winter, the people or The People begin to demand that the government governs for them and not just for the elites.

 

       What a fond socialist (see?  I don’t even have the optimism to start it with a capital letter) dream that is!