What really makes sense nowadays?

 

 

 

 

Twelve days early morning swimming in the outdoor community pool!  Only two days to go before my local indoor pool reopens after the yearly fortnight maintenance closure.  Considering I was contemplating paying to use the Gavá pool, I’m quids in!  But it will be a relief to get back to my normal routine on Monday of next week

     In spite of the fact that I have given myself an extra hour or so in bed, to allow the sun to rise before I immerse myself in the chilly waters, I can’t say that I have benefited from the lie-in.  My body clock will not be denied, and I continue to wake up as if my swim was at 7 am, and any bedtime after my inexorable early rising time, is forced rather than easy and so, in the scheme of things, doesn’t really count.

     Apart from two startled Dutch strangers, I have swum alone since a week last Monday, and those interlopers were obviously just proving they had access to everything, as you do when you have just arrived for your holiday and feel that you must use all the facilities at once to get value for money!

     I would like to report that my lonely circling of the pool allowed my mind to drift into poetic reveries and that I, immediately on exiting the pool, rushed to my notebook, and wrote out my exquisite thoughts before they evaporated like the water on my skin.  Alas!  Not so! 

     The only time an image suggested itself was when, this morning, I (grudgingly) swum in the aftermath of a short, quasi, sun-shower, and the drips from the overarching pine trees produced little, short-lived bubbles on the surface of the pool.  Even then, when I did get out, writing in my notebook was not the first thing I did, and you might say that noting that omission is my way of encouraging myself to get on with it and at least jot down the phrases that (while swimming at least) seemed to have some poetic legs!

     I have also written nothing ‘poetic’ about the “collective hysteria” (one cousin) that has prompted actions like the laying of flowers (another cousin) to mark the death of QEII.

 

 

 

 

 

 

     The royal circus has now reached Wales, and there is a service in Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff and then a meeting in the Senedd.  Welsh First Minister Drakeford has made it clear that protest by anti-royalists is something that must be allowed and has suggested that the South Wales Police will be appreciative of that right.  We’ll see how that goes.

     Memories of my first and only trip to Mexico came back to mind when hearing about The Queue – it surely deserves the capital letter as it has become a defining aspect of The British Character. 

     Our arrival in Mexico for holiday after a very long and excruciatingly uncomfortable sardine-flight was just the prelude to a series of what I can only describe as humiliations.  We had to queue to get inside the airport, then queue to join a queue for customs, and then further queue to get through the various obstacles that Mexican bureaucracy provided before we were finally allowed to enter the country. 

     Now, from the comfort of my own armchair in Catalonia, I can watch a similar queueing quandary as the Main Queue for the lying-in-state has been (allegedly) closed because the maximum length has been reached, but people undeterred by the eleven-hour wait, have taken it upon themselves to unofficially queue in a park to wait to join the official queue! This is tantamount to insanity.

 

 

 

 

 

     I am reminded also of a story I heard about The Festival of Britain in 1951.  Although the war ended in 1945, rationing would not end until 1954, so the futuristic architecture, plate glass and colour of The Festival of Britain was something extraordinary.  It was a very popular exhibition, a statement of determination and optimism in the somewhat dreary post-war years and intended to be a “Tonic to the Nation!”  In total over eight million people visited the main exhibition site on the South Bank of the Thames, and I have been told that people were employed to go around the site and break up queues that had formed spontaneously. 

     Giving rationing and the scarcity of so much just after the war, people were used to queueing, and once a queue formed, it developed its own integrity with the people at the head of the queue thinking that there must be something worth waiting for because there were people behind them, and the people behind them assuming the same things given the people in front!

     I would, of course, maintain that both the queue for the late Queen and also the phantom queues of The Festival of Britain are alike in having no ‘real’ end destination.  I know that there is the viewing of a coffin on a catafalque in an ancient hammer-beam roofed hall, and there is always an off-chance of seeing a prince or two or the changing of the guard to justify the wait, but essentially the whole thing is a nothing.  It is a celebration of absence, of a distant unknowable entity now gone.  It is a fantasy of historicism and of significance, it is an illusion tyring to pretend to be something real.  But it’s not, no matter how many people emote when they see the symbols and think that they are participating. They are as deluded as those people queuing for nothing on The South Bank in 1951, and ironically in 2022 they are back queueing on The South Bank again.

     Where are the people to break up this queue and say, “Move on, there’s nothing to see here!”

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!

A fairy story already going wrong!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Petulant Prince” or “The Cantankerous King”

     It sounds as if it ought to be the title to one of the fairy stories that Oscar wrote, a seemingly simple tale, told directly and simply with a poignantly heart-warming moral at the end.

     But this is what is laughingly called real life and though it has a ‘real’ prince, he is not the handsome ingenue all golden curls and peachy skin, no, this is an ageing man who has endured decades of being on the side-lines and now can almost feel the impress of the coronation crown on his head.  He’s well past retirement age and the passions that filled his heir apparent youth, middle age, and early old age, must now be supressed for the greater good of maintaining the position of ‘The Firm’ in the public imagination.

     The image of ‘The Firm’ (a term coined by a man who often unsettled the fantasy of the importance of the Royal Family himself) is a delicate balancing act to maintain, and there have had to have been a certain amount of dynastic acrobatics to keep ‘The Firm’ alive and well. 

     Although The Queen has played her role almost to perfection, in her studied probity, determined neutrality, and political vacuousness, the same cannot be said for her children and other members of the wider family.  Scandal, corruption, speaking out of turn, crassness, divorce, fire, and death – the back story of King Charles III is well worthy of a much saltier series than the reverential TV saga presently working its way towards the present.

     The Transition is a delicate time for any organization, but much more so for an institution that defies reason, logic, and democracy, and really needs the political and social version of smoke and mirrors to justify its existence.

     And what has our Petulant Prince (aka The Cantankerous King) done to ease the transition from QEII to CIII?  Apart from making his every public utterance sound as if he is auditioning for the Boris Karloff role in something like The Sombre Crypt, he has shown all too clearly his pettiness.

     The YouTube films doing the rounds are concerned with pens, and the intolerable pressures that such writing implements put on our new monarch.

     The first bout of pen pressure came during the televised signing of the proclamation of his new position.  The proclamation was on a large sheet of vellum (?) and Charles found that the inkwells were in the way and grimaced and imperiously tried to wave the thing away with regal hand flips while saying “I can’t be expected to move the thing!”  No indeed, moving a small piece of desk furniture is obviously a no-no for a man who has servants to iron shoelaces flat and put toothpaste on his toothbrush!

 

 

 

 

 

     The signing of the visitors’ book in Northern Ireland was even worse when, having first written down the wrong date, he discovered that his pen was leaking.  He did a mini-rampage and swore, “bloody thing!”

     This would all be quite amusing, if such entitled petulance was not from a man who had just been made head of state.  If he finds it difficult to cope with a misplaced inkwell and a leaking pen, it really doesn’t say very much for his future ability to cope with issues that might be of a little more moment!

     But if you could laugh at his various hissy fits over ink and the way it is applied to surfaces (including his fingers) there is nothing funny about the story that, while a thanksgiving service for the Queen was in progress in St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, warnings of redundancy notices were issued to staff working for the former Prince Charles in Clarence House. 

     While the move from being ‘Prince’ Charles and the heir to the throne, to being King Charles III would of necessity entail some movement – physically from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace, and administratively from Prince to King – the optics of telling staff, some of whom had worked for the Prince for decades, that their jobs were on the line while a commemorative service for the Queen was happening and before she had even been buried, was bad to say the least.  Or crass.  Or unfeeling.  Or even, un-kingly.

     Some people have been quick to defend the king and make the point that his mother had just died, and he found himself under great stress, no matter how long he had waited for the moment and how many plans had been made for a smooth transition. 

     And that is the point, plans have been made for years, every detail has been considered and planned for.  The movement of staff, or their replacement, or amalgamation or whatever must have been planned for, long in advance, so why the hugger-mugger inept and insensitive speed with which to tell long serving employees that they were going to be sacked.

     It remains that the public face of the king is now seen as a that of a petty old man, who demands everything be ‘just so’ and is enraged when it isn’t.  He could, of course, have turned any slight inconvenience into something of a joke and passed-off the moment with deft insouciance.  But he didn’t.  Because he isn’t that sort of man.  And, slight though the ink-related issues might be, the staffing inconsideration is much more worrying.

     I think that Charles starts his reign with an overarching sense of, “it could have been done differently.”

     Perhaps that might just sum him up.