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.

 

 

 

A Cold Rant!

 

 

 

It may have been something to do with the cold, making me feel even more misanthropic than usual, or it may just be the way that my mind works, but I began to think of the Decline of Empires and how values are, well, devalued as a society sinks into the abyss.

     It is, after all, very easy to get into an apocalyptic way of thinking when a pandemic is raging around us and economic disaster is an everyday reality.  People talking of ‘The New Normal’ as if it is just a slight change in the weather, rather than a radical rethinking of the way that we have been doing things.  When you see a film on television and it shows crowds of people jostling their ways around a crowded city; when you see people flocking to stadia or theatres; when you see people greeting each other with a friendly kiss on either cheek – and you think, that is another world, you begin to realize just how massive a change in the way that we behave and the way that we think has taken place.  What we did this time last year was BC – before Covid.  A different world, another country, foreign, they did things differently there.  That is a bit of a mash-up of L P Hartley’s famous opening line of The Go-Between, but it expresses the sense of strangeness that passing time gives, or perhaps demands.

     The true strangeness of our times is that this revolution in our activity has taken place in months, not years.  Even with World War Two there was a sort of phoney war to get people used to the fact that there was a war on.  Yes, there was the air raid warning that went off soon after the declaration of war, but it was a false alarm, my Dad was in London at the time and remembered the sense of, “Bloody hell!  Here we go!” and the rueful anti-climax when no bombers swooped into sight.  London and the rest of the country soon learned the reality of all out total war.

     I am not sure what sort of reality prevails at the moment.  We live a fairly enclosed life, with the occasional sally out for lunch or supplies, but we have not left our area for months, but I refuse to believe that the pelotons of cyclists that I passed on my morning ride along the paseo had dressed up in all their latex awfulness just to ride the few kilometres contained in our town - in spite of curfew being in force from 10 pm on Friday night to 6 am on Monday morning part of which demands that no one moves from their municipalities.

     People are cherry-picking the rules that they want to follow.  The number of cyclists, runners, dog walkers, and strollers who were not wearing masks is astonishingly high.  They want normality to be here now, and they are perhaps used to living in a society where instant gratification is the norm.  Covid breaks the norms, the trick is understanding that fact.

     But, back to the Decline of Empire and the Decadence that is its usual accompaniment.  Britain is a country where the time for sighing over lost empire is so far in the historical past that we should just shut up and get on with living with the status of a relatively rich but relatively uninfluential country.  Our ‘special relationship’ with the USA is a sad self-deluding joke and we belittle ourselves as we preen ourselves in the reflected glory of a richer and much more powerful friend and ally.

     Trump has tested the strength of American democracy and illustrated its weaknesses.  His sad continuing tantrum that reality does not bow to his own sick idea of reality would be pathetic and risible, if he was not the most powerful man in the world with truly frightening resources at his disposal.  This is where the cheap comparison with Hitler in his bunker falls down; Hitler was sending imaginary armies to fight against his inevitable defeat, Trump has at his disposal weapons that make the whole of the arsenal of the last world war look like fireworks.  Trump can send real armies into the abyss!

     Even though he has been defeated, even though he is a lame-duck president, even though the leaders of the world have congratulated Biden on his victory, the Orange Outrage still persists in his presidential petulance and every day he devalues his office a little (and some days a great deal) more.

     But what has really struck me about the grotesquery of Trump’s tenure in the White House is how brazen he has been in rewarding the people like himself, privileged white plutocrats (if he does actually have the money to entitle himself to that title).  He has cut tax for the very rich, he has reduced restrictions of manufacturing, he has opened up areas for mineral exploitation, he has degraded many of the agencies which protect our physical and financial environment.  He has worked (between golf rounds) on making sure that his friends, family and industrialists have all benefited.

     What is shocking is not that Trump has demonstrated no ethical standards in his government, who would have expected him to be anything outher than he turned out to be, but what is shocking is the extent to which he has been aided and abetted to stay in office by those around him.

     When a friend was working, very unhappily, in a school where the owner was making everybody’s’ lives unbearable, I had to tell her the simple truth about the owner, she simply did not care.  To the question which began, “But how can she . . . “ the answer was, “She doesn’t care!”   

     The Republicans in the Senate and in the House have shown that they simply, “do not care”.  As long as they get what they want they can allow the president to do little or nothing as a quarter of a million fellow Americans die of Covid; they can work to repeal the Affordable Care Act threatening to leave millions of poorer Americans without health insurance; they can stuff courts with ill-suited right-wing judges; they can lie; they can be proven hypocrites and they simply don’t care.

     The shocking thing is that it is all so plain to see.  They lie and cheat in plain sight.  They are caught out again, and again, and again.  But they simply don’t care.  Because the people that are suffering are not them.

     The Republicans have allowed a clearly unsuited person to be president.  They have supported him in the face of indisputable facts which disprove his position.  They have been venial and base – and they should be finished as a political party.

     Perhaps they are.  The sick nightmare of the Republican Party that has been formed in Trump’s image is perhaps something that will linger on longer than the one-term president who allowed the absurd parody of self-interest to stand for Republican American politics,

     The truly sad thing about the last days of the would-be despot is that he had the second highest number of votes ever cast for a presidential candidate and still people cling to his lies and delusions.  There are weeks to go before he finally leaves the White House and the trappings of power are taken from his tiny hands.  God alone knows what mischief he can do in that time.

     And he will be supported by Republicans in both houses, because they do not care.

Too much, is too much

 

It comes to something that I regard as a positive achievement the fact that I can squeeze myself sideways through a narrow path of piled high possessions to get to my desk on the third floor in an almost direct passageway from the top of the stairs!  The room still looks as though it has been ransacked by indiscriminate looters, but believe me, that is an improvement on what it looked like before the attempt to turn the electricity grid in the house into a way of getting better reception for my internet radio.

     If you are still reading after ploughing your way through the last two unnecessarily complex sentences, I salute your fortitude and your innate optimism in assuming there must be a linguistic or literary reward for perusing such verbiage!

     I have never, it must be said, been able to keep a clear desk.  Whether at home or at school or work (which was also school) my desk (no matter how big it was) would, in a matter of days be reduced to a workspace more suited to a submarine than a spacious house.

     Take this moment for example.  I sit in front of a computer, in front of which is an Apple ‘magic’ keyboard and a presumably equally enchanted touch pad.  The amount of free space on my expansive desk is (I have just measured it) is a thin strip of desk on the left-hand side of the keyboard of some 12 cms!

     Just to give you some idea of what I do with ease and a certain aplomb I will describe what I can see from where I sit – and I am going to give you only the briefest outline of what ‘things’ there are occupying the space that should be free for papers and books.

     On my right is a book of post-its (with another collection of post-its further in the debris) with a rogue CD, notebooks, a copy of The Economist from April 2013; a cable for linking to the Internet; a book stand; a DVD of ‘Weekend’ – a film by Andrew Haigh with Tom Cullen who I used to teach; a disc drive; ‘The Arts of Spain’ by José Gudiol, published by Thames and Hudson; a reMarkable electronic tablet; a metal book end and a packet of blutac.  All of that lot (and more) blends into the printer and a bookcase arching over it.

     The sheer amount of stuff on the left-hand side is overwhelming and to list it in any detail will call into question not only my sanity but also my sanity.  Suffice to say a (highly edited) list of what is there includes a low cardboard box decorated with multiple images of Warhol’s Marilyn that I have designated as an ‘Archive’; a box of Christmas cards; an Internet radio; three pairs of scissors (me neither); pens, pencils, rulers; an electric pencil sharpener; a large bottle of black printer ink and a collection of plastic straws 70cms long.  There is a reason that I bought those straws, and it has nothing to do with Blue Peter constructions or drinking!

     So, I am confined to a tiny space in front of the computer.  If I do any writing that needs recourse to reference books, I have no space whatsoever to lay them out around me. 

     And because the third floor is so cluttered, there is no space to move things while you decide where to put them.  If you see what I mean.

 

     

 

     Toni accuses me of suffering from Diogenes’ Syndrome, where the unfortunate cannot throw things away.  I am not convinced by this as I seem to recall that Diogenes was the philosopher who was keen to divest himself of all physical possessions and who lived in utter simplicity (and nakedness) in a barrel.  Is the name of the syndrome based on irony?  Anyway, although, it is true that I do have a disinclination to throw things away (You never know when they might come in useful!) all the things I keep have a basic utility.  I find it hard to throw away containers, even though containers allow me to squirrel things away that otherwise might have been dispensed with.

     I remember, from years ago, a medical drama series, in which one episode concerned a medical technician who created very specific pieces of equipment for very specific patients – and then he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of those pieces of equipment, in spite of the fact that the individuality was so pronounced that their general utility was zero.  I think the more astute among you will have worked out where the narrative thrust is going.  Sure enough, a patient appears whose treatment demands just such a piece of equipment that he has in his stores and which people have been urging him to junk because it is taking up valuable, expensive room.  Diogenes justified.  But that is not why I remember the episode.

     After his triumph of being able to magic up something extraordinary for a particular patient ‘from stock,’ another scene showed him in his stockroom kicking something that he tried to move and dislodged a whole welter of other bits and pieces and saying, almost in tears of frustration, something like, “I hate all this bloody junk!”

     I am sure that the episode was not quite like that, but I remember it because it gave both sides: one piece did save a life, but most of what he had was junk and took up space.  I liked the complexity of his being proved right, but still probably being wrong in his indiscriminate belief that everything and anything might be useful.

     The Health Service can take whatever money is given to it, there will always be something that needs funding.  But funding is finite.  At some point decisions have to be made; judgements that have life changing consequences.  Just like the space for the technician’s ‘junk’.

     These decisions and judgements are not theoretical, they are being made all the time.  In the Days of Covid those decisions are here and now, we can see (and bury) the results of political decisions about what to do with limited resources.

 

 

 

 

 

     As we are Waiting for Vaccine, we have to hope that those vials are not the Godot of our times, and that the right decisions and judgements are being made on our behalf!