Tell me you are kidding!

 

 

 

 

 

The question that I keep asking myself is, “All Johnson is doing at the moment, it’s all just theatrics?  Right?”

     No one in their right minds would accept a no-deal Brexit as anything other than a disaster.  A disaster on so many different levels that it will take an age just to work out the detail of the disaster, as every day will bring new revelations of extra dimensions of “shotinthefootery” that we had not previously anticipated.

     Seeing that ungainly scruff represent the safety of my future in Brussels was a true low point.  How has it come to this, that an entitled chancer is ‘leading’ negotiations for an agreement in the dying days of our membership of the EU?  Johnson puts himself forward as a spokesman for the people of Britain, a concept he neither understands nor believes in.  He is a spokesman only for himself.  He cares nothing for the ‘people of Britain’ because they are, clearly, not him.  And he is his universe.

     I would love to believe that the charade of negotiation that is going on at the moment is nothing more than window dressing for the final capitulation to economic reality as some sort of agreement (any bloody sort of agreement) is signed.  He can then bask in the excitement of pushing the EU to the limit and managing to extract something that he will display as a triumph of his steely determination.

 

   Johnson has already displayed his linguistic ‘imagination’ in redefining what “oven ready deal” meant; his explanation/clarification that he was referring to the withdrawal agreement and not to anything more is puerile in its mendacity and laughable in its believability.  But if it works for him and allows him to redefine a few other realities to get an agreement signed, I will settle for the gibbering word soup that he uses for communication and be relieved.

     But, if Johnson’s character is as nakedly, narcissistically, opportunistic as we have had ample proof of in his actions since he landed in Number 10, then we could be looking at someone who judges that a hard Brexit of no agreement could be something that he could get away with.  Whatever that means in his insular world view.

     I am more worried today than I have been since the awful result of the referendum.  All my worst imaginings could be crawling (it has been four and a half years of negotiation, after all) to reality.

     I am, by nature, an optimist, but my essential cheeriness is being stretched to the limit.

 

I usually try and find something of a lighter nature to end my piece of writing, but I do not feel that it would be appropriate.  I remember watching an excellent TV drama during the time of a previous Conservative regime which showed a mother bringing a tray with tea making things on it, which she dropped, and then shouted, “Look what that bloody woman has made me do now!”  We could still laugh at such an overreaction, even as Thatcher’s malign premiership poisoned so many aspects of British life – but what is threatened by a no-deal on Brexit will make what Thatcher did look like the “sunlit uplands” compared to the all-encompassing, unfolding misery of the reality of Brexit.

 

 

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 26 – Good Friday in Holy Week, 10th APRIL

As an Anglican atheist it may come as a surprise that it is today that the restrictions on movement have hit me most.  I do not go out of my way to visit churches during the year, but Good Friday (for reasons about which I am not entirely sure, see above re. atheism) is one of the day on which I make every effort to visit a church, to go inside, to sit down for a few moments and think.

     Toni has given up trying to understand my attitude and now merely shrugs with something approaching disdain when I voice my predilections.  For whatever reasons I want to visit a church today and I can’t.  And I miss it.

     I have tried the idea of the virtual tour, but that does not even remotely touch the spot in my psyche that demands a touch of the ecclesiastic, because it is not just the look of the place to which I respond.

     Although the sort of Anglican atheism that I espouse is ‘Low Church’ my background in St Augustine’s Church in Rumney was ‘High Church’ in its ceremonial.  Ceremonial, I might add in which I participated as a lowly server, cassocked and surplice as an acolyte, boat boy, thurifer, book boy and eventually MC – and people wondered why I chose a Cardinal as my fancy dress when going to a party in college! 

      The point is, that my experience of churches is an olfactory one as well – there is something very distinctive about the smell of old incense lingering among the pews.  And then there is the sound.

     I favour older churches with high-beamed ancient roofs (probably extensively mucked about with in Victorian times) where there is a distinct echoing resonance when the place is empty.  In the days when churches used to be left unlocked, I would visit new and interesting examples on holidays and, if they were empty, I would go to the lectern and read a section of the bible out loud to hear the acoustic.  So for me there is a distinct sonic quality that I treasure in churches.  Even in modern examples of the architecture there is something to take out of the experience of visiting.

     I do not find most churches welcoming places, I mean I like being inside them, but people are usually a bit stand offish.  I will never forget going to early morning communion in a parish church in Edgbaston where I felt like a modern day peasant among the well-heeled congregation (you only had to look at the cars parked) and I was comprehensively ignored by priest and congregation alike.  Ho hum!  But there is something about the atmosphere and the hardness of the pews that encourages introspection.

     And I like the restraint.  At least the restraint that I find in churches in the UK.  Good Friday in the UK is a bleak time to be inside a church where images are shrouded, the altar is stripped and there are no flowers.  In Catalan churches there is the same shrouding, but there is a concentration on the gory so there is often a horrifically realistic corpse somewhere around to focus the mind: the suffering of Christ with blood and wounds is very much to the fore.

     Well, this year I’m at home and there is not even a soaring spire above the trees to be observed from the third floor.  No bells have rung, or not within the hearing of our house.  This is a day like every other in isolation.  Like every other day in Holy Week.  Identity is attached to the days, they possess none themselves.

     So, what will my poem today describe?  How will its usual identity change?  At the moment I have no idea, but, by the end of the day a draft will have been added to the Holy Week collection at smrnewpoems.blogspot.com  I hope.

Well, I’ve written a draft that is now in the blog above.

I spoke to Irene on the telephone and we are both getting progressively more worried by the attitude of our political masters who seem to be far more concerned with the economic situation of the country than with the health and life of the citizens.

     The key will be what happens after Easter.  Easter Monday is a Bank Holiday (if we are still concerned by such things) and the National Government seems to be concerned to get people back to work.  Any diminution in the stringency of the lockdown will have a disproportionate effect and will weaken the overall population’s dedication to the lockdown and there will be a progressive disinclination to behave properly.  And then an increase in death.

     Perhaps I am being unduly pessimistic, but the next couple of weeks are going to be crucial to the way the crisis develops and I lack faith in the politics of it all!