Present depression; future hope!

 

 

“He looks like a homeless person,” my friend in the swimming pool said this morning before we started our swim, “With a tie!”  Perhaps it doesn’t need me to tell you which English political character he was taking about, given the international publicity that shuffling lummox has had over his latest U-turn.

     If it wasn’t for the unnecessary deaths that his ineptitude and indolence have caused, it would be rollickingly funny.  But it isn’t.  It’s a national humiliation as each new catastrophic missed opportunity or slipshod execution pushes the figures even further beyond the “optimistic” projected number of 20,000 dead by the end of the pandemic that was voiced with some belief in the early stages of the infection! 

     I hope that the increasing dead haunt Johnson’s every waking thought because it is his ‘”leadership’” that has pushed the figures into the national disgrace that they have become.  I think that the charges of “corporate manslaughter” that Johnson and his cabinet should face are becoming more and more of a necessity if the thousands of excess deaths are ever going to be properly laid at the feet of the architect of the political chaos that helped make them.  Indeed, I think that the term “manslaughter” is far, far too mild for what he and his low-life ministers have actually done.

 

However bitter my thoughts and how eager I am to see Johnson brought to justice; I know that my writing is just so much bile.  Even if Johnson were to read it he wouldn’t recognize the application to himself; he is so much of a narcissist that he would ‘naturally’ push the blame off on to someone else.  Responsibility has never been one of his strong points, well, not even a point really, so he would brush off any criticism as ‘inapplicable’ and carry on in the way that he has lived all of his life: falling upwards and ignoring negative opinions. 

     The only problem that I foresee is that his final comeuppance will come, but at a price that will involve the whole of the United Kingdom (for as long as that concept is going to survive his governance) in taking the hit for his failures, and he will gambol away (possibly humming a merry tune like Cameron) as he disappears into the lucrative lecture circuit and shallow book writing future that he has mapped out for himself.

     But wait, I was forgetting, as a past holder of his present post he will be entitled (?) to a peerage, Lord Boris of Bullshit, floridly resplendent in his (probably borrowed) robes, so that he can continue fleecing the country with his lordly per diems!

 

Enough!  We have only hours (or days, or weeks, or months, or years) left before the latest deadline for a Brexit agreement.  Has anyone bothered to count up the number of deadlines that have come and gone?  I do hope that someone has kept track of what we were offered and what we could have got at all the times in the past when an agreement was in the offing.  I am more than sure that what (if anything) we end up with will be a pale reflection of what we could have had if we had etc etc etc, and specifically if self-harming opposition of people like the Odious Rees-Mogg and the Unthinkable IDS had not been invented.  I have to admit that one finds it hard to imagine that those two (together with the unmentionables in the rabid Brexit gang) ever being ‘born’ in the normal human way.

With a lurch, I will try to stop foaming at the mouth with justifiable resentment and anger and become a trifle more composed.

     This evening I am going to a carol concert in Wales.  Not in reality of course, but virtually via Zoom.  The Cardiff Ardwyn Singers are presenting a Christmas Concert of carols dedicated to the memory of Gaynor Wilkins, wife of John, both of whom were connected with the Choir. 

     Money raised via the link below will go to the Haematology Unit for Cardiff and Vale Health Charity in recognition of the care that they showed in the treatment of Gaynor’s rare form of blood cancer Myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS)

www.justgiving.com/fundraising/rhiannon-wilkins

Something real.

Are you sitting comfortably?

 

 

 

Even though we are at the fag-end of the year, something happened today that will be the defining feature for me, and possibly for a few others too.

     My ‘creative space’ is not my brain, it is a ‘squalid corner’ of the third floor where my desk (cluttered) is hemmed in on one side by a sawn-off storage unit, a plastic segmented bookcase and a queeny printer; on the other by a series of CD box vaults, the back of an IKEA bookcase and an Anglepoise (knock-off not real) lamp; behind three low-rise bookshelves, a bewilderingly large number of plastic mini-shelved units and a lopsided arrangement of Things Too Large to Put Away Properly; in front is a low wall and the stair well.  And this altogether conducive-to-creation ensemble is finished by a high-backed office chair that is literally falling to bits, with the faux leather coming away in specks.

     Enough, I said to myself, I said, is enough!  A new chair is necessary and, furthermore, it will be something that can sweep up my Christmas and Name Day offerings into one coherent present.  The ‘Name Day’ thing is important in this part of the world and you ignore the recognition-through-presents at your own risk, it therefore follows (as the night the day) that reciprocation can work together for good.  As my Name Day is actually Boxing Day a seasonal personal present objective makes sense, so I thought a new chair would concentrate minds and contributions.

     Having tried a selection of chairs in all the main superstore outlets in the vicinity and found all of them lacking, Toni actually discovered a dedicated office furniture outlet with ‘sale’ prices in Cornella, a place a few towns along one of our motorways and a place passed through by me on my daily journey to the School on the Hill.

     Today was the day we visited the place.  I had (in mind and written in my notebook) a list of desirable attributes of the New Chair.  It had to have  i) a base of five wheeled feet  ii) a high back  iii) gas suspension  iv) be ergonomic  v) be made of leather  vi) have no arms or have removable arms  vii) look ‘the business’.  I did have a vague sort of idea of what sort of cost it might be, but I decided to be adventurous.

     The end result of much sitting and trying this and then trying that, was that the ergonomic trumped the leather.  The seat that I have decided on, and indeed ordered for delivery in January looks a bit more medical than office-like, but it is comfortable and virtually everything that can, adjusts.

     And the cost.

     Toni was and still is shell-shockedly stunned that any sentient life-form could even contemplate paying so much for what is, after all, at the end of the day, an office chair.  Well, I have.  Or at least I have paid a deposit.  And even the 20% deposit was large.  So, you can imagine that the whole thing (the other 80%) is, well, monstrous.

     In my defence, I would opine that my complete lack of smoking is a major factor in allowing sums of money which would have gone up in smoke and been ingested in tar to be used for something that is much more (much more) useful and necessary.  But is an awfully large sum of money.  For a chair.

     And, as its main material is a sort of mesh (to allow for air flow and healthiness) you don’t even get plush, buttoned leather for your money – in spite of the fact that the money you have paid could easily have allowed wheels to have been fitted to a handmade ottoman and still have had money left over.

     And I don’t care.  I have got (or at least will have) what I wanted.  And it is something that will be used.  And used constantly.  And, and I think I am trying to persuade myself here rather than any reader.  And so, I will stop.  But I (and that is the important pronoun) I, think that it is money well spent.  And I sincerely trust that I will be saying that in twenty years’ time (when I am still using the bloody thing) and then dividing the price I paid in 2020 by the number of years I have been using it and saying to myself, “It’s a bargain!” and “My back has never felt better!” and so on.

     I am further encouraged by the fact that the person selling me thing was actually using one of them as her own office chair.  And that has to be good.  Doesn’t it?  Yes?

     What the AOTC (Advent of the Chair) will necessitate is Doing Something to the chaos of the third floor.  Such a splendid beast must have space in which to dominate the surroundings.  The detritus behind me at the moment must go.  Where?  I know not, but somewhere not behind me.  The Chair will be brought unto me by the lackeys of the firm and they will Construct The Chair, presumably by bringing up the pieces to the third floor.  There is no room whatsoever to do any construction so, what years of nagging by Toni have failed to do, the AOTC will force me to do: create space where no space exists.

     My last and latest attempt to Clear Up the third floor comprised checking through long unopened files and junking and shredding irrelevant papers.  This created gratifying large bags of rubbish, but not any appreciable space as I had been excavating rather than bulldozing.  Something much more radical is called for, and to be frank, I am not sure that I can muster up enough iconoclastic zeal to do the necessary.  Toni has, bless him, offered to do the ‘tidying up’ for me, but I know that I would have to ‘dispose’ of him after the event when I realized what priceless pieces of ephemera he might have got rid of!

     So, the next few weeks are going to demand a positively Dominican level of material rejection from me if I am to make any impression on the cluttered chaos.  Wish me luck or wish me the equanimity to see the AOTC as setting a diamond in the dross of attic confusion!

     And yes, I am well aware that I have not actually told you the price of the thing.  And yes, I have no intention whatsoever of so doing.  I may be happy (if that is the word that I am looking for) with what I have done, but I think that I can only convince others by denying them specific totals.  Better to speculate with lurid imagination rather than condemn in black and white!  And you will have noticed that I chose a generic chair for illustration rather than something more identifiable.

 

 

 

 

And talking of the unjustifiable, Johnson is trying to have his cake and eat it: he fulfils his promise to allow us to celebrate Christmas but wants us not to do it because it will fuel the increase in Covid infection.  So, what this appalling man is actually doing is putting the onus on the British People.  He lacks the courage to admit that he was wrong to promise a variant on the “it will be all over by Christmas” (that always works out well!) and instead of imposing legally enforceable restrictions he is leaving it all up to us.  He will then, of course, wash his hands and say that it was made clear by the government that there were risks involved and people were warned, but people will be people and therefore you have only yourselves to blame!  He truly is repellent.

     Here in Catalonia and in Spain things do not appear to be much better.  Our prime minister has had to self-isolate because of his proximity to the French president and we all know that all hell is going to break out after the Christmas period.

     We have gone through a year when normal has been taken out roughed up, lightly killed, spat at, insulted, trampled on and general bad mouthed.  I think we know that we are in the final stretch, and I further think that we know that the final stretch is not going to be measured in weeks but rather in months.  And probably quite a few months.  I am telling myself that I will be lucky, very lucky, if I am vaccinated by April.  And since I tick a few of the ‘at risk’ boxes, I think it is going to be the end of the summer or the middle of the autumn until a majority of the country is close to having had the jab.

     Given those expectations, Christmas is neither here nor there, it is just an odd date in the unrelenting sequences that we have been subject to during this pandemic.

 

But my chair will be here in January.  Something concrete to look forward to.

Rule breaker - rule suggester!

 

 We are building up to yet another Johnsonian U-Turn, in which department he is something of an expert!  And he is being aided and abetted in his Ballet of Deception by the President of the EC who keeps to the script of “some progress” and “real differences” so that the final agreement (at the last possible moment) makes it appear as if Johnson has actually mastered his way to something real and acceptable.

     Let’s face it, any agreement will be better than none.  But when the final Johnson scrap of paper makes its appearance, I will be looking to informed commentators to explain when in the last four years we could have had something similar, or exactly the same or better! 

     In truth Johnson is no negotiator: he lacks the patience, application, wisdom, detail, ethos and everything else that a true champion of British interests needs. 

     Yes, he can trumpet meaningless three-word slogans and he can jumble metaphor and simile in a lurid word salad; but do the hard, detailed work for complex negotiations?  Not a chance. 

     And his opposite numbers in the EU know him for what he is (a lazy chancer and liar) and know that they have to act as stooges to his stand-up to get anything done.

     The professionals in the EU must shrug with weary resignation as they accept yet another session of baby minding as the nappy-wearing infant wiffles into view tousling his hair as he goes.  They can’t treat him with the contempt that he deserves because they recognize (as he can’t) that there is more at stake in the negotiations than individual reputations. 

     It is indeed sad to realize that the only people with the interests of the United Kingdom at heart are the people that the Brexiteers have caricatured and rejected!

     Ah well, I hope that the adults in the room are able to convince the baby that an agreement is there for the taking, by giving the crowd-pleaser enough belief that he has managed to achieve something of moment that will keep the rabid sections of his carnivorous party away from his all too solid flesh!

     It is obvious from the latest news broadcast that this farce of negotiation is going to be drawn out until we are all bored with it and won’t look too closely at what Johnson will actually have achieved. 

     Well, on with the comedy, I’m still waiting for my first laugh!

 

 

 

On a more positive literary note, Tim Harford’s new book now shares a place with my first Peter Gabriel record.  I heard a snatch of Jeux sans frontieres on the radio years ago and immediately went into town and bought the Gabriel LP; a couple of days ago I heard a snatch of Tim Harford reading his book and immediately went to my computer and ordered a copy from Amazon – which arrived the next day. 

     I am sure that there is an historical lesson to be learned from the different approaches of the two purchases which are 40 years apart!

     Tim Harford is the presenter of the quintessentially Radio 4 programme, More or Less, a programme that studies and discusses the statistics and other assorted mathematical claims made in the media and gives a reasoned evaluation of the value of the numbers and how they have been arrived at.  His voice has an undemonstrative yet compelling quality to it, as witness my immediate order for his book  The book I purchased is called How to Make the World Add Up and is subtitled Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers.  His style is conversational, authoritative with being preachy; it’s full of examples and reads like a novel.

     The title might suggest a top-down sort of approach, but Harford writes as if he genuinely wants to inform and facilitate.  He is fair and gently provocative and uses his considerable experience to explain and expand.

     This is a book worth buying, not just reading!  I recommend it without hesitation!

     It is, by the way, exactly the sort of book that those in government should be forced to read and then be made to sign that they have done so and promise to let the Ten Rules guide their thinking!  We would live in a much better world if they did!