Wanderlust - Travelling Eternity Road

Like everyone else I’ve been at home for months with little prospect of going anywhere. Luckily, I don’t mind. I’m happy and safe at home, or at my place of work for a couple of days a week. Over time, I’ve become so contented at home that I dread going out to anywhere busy. Social media showed pictures of Blackpool taken this Bank Holiday weekend of the crowded promenade, not a face-mask in sight. I don’t see the resort as getting back on its feet after lockdown, I just see fear, but that’s my problem to overcome. In a few weeks I will be travelling over the border into my beloved Dumfries & Galloway and our home from home – pandemic permitting. I’ll be fine, doing my own thing, keeping to my own space and allowing my wanderlust to take me into Galloway Forest and the quiet, hidden beaches along the Solway Firth. I will have plenty of face-masks.

My photo: somewhere on the west coast of South Uist

I wish we had a motor home or a camper van. In my wanderlust dreams I pack it with everything we need and set off, northbound, stopping wherever the fancy takes us, then destination, the Outer Hebrides. It is another world. We could stay as long as we like and be more relaxed about it. Up to now, our trips have been governed by annual leave and it isn’t long enough, even with a bank holiday tagged on the end. Things will change soon. Time will be our own and we’ll be able to just go for it – pandemic, lockdown and personal worries aside.

Back in the good old days when The Moody Blues did a UK tour, we’d be with them, going to places we otherwise wouldn’t go. I suppose that was a form of wanderlust, even though we booked everything in advance and knew exactly where we were going and for how long. We were ‘Travelling Eternity Road’ if you like, including Manchester Apollo, or now I think it is called O2, we would drive home from there; London would be part of a sight-seeing holiday, Birmingham, got to be in their home city, often where the last concert would be, and anywhere else we could factor in. Lots of concerts over many years. It was always worth it.

If I felt ready to mingle with the rest of society, I would have travelled to Wembley, supporting Blackpool F.C. in their successful play-off final against Lincoln City. Instead, I watched on TV at home. Feeling stressed and holding my breath for the most of ninety-odd minutes isn’t healthy. In my house there were shrieks, screams, tears and much applause. The neighbours knew we were home.

I found this, by Alfred Joyce Kilmer:

Roofs
(For Amelia Josephine Burr)

The road is wide and the stars are out
and the breath of the night is sweet,
And this is the time when wanderlust should seize upon my feet.
But I'm glad to turn from the open road and the starlight on my face,
And to leave the splendour of out-of-doors for a human dwelling place.

I never have seen a vagabond who really liked to roam
All up and down the streets of the world and not to have a home:
The tramp who slept in your barn last night and left at break of day
Will wander only until he finds another place to stay.

A gypsy-man will sleep in his cart with canvas overhead;
Or else he'll go into his tent when it is time for bed.
He'll sit on the grass and take his ease so long as the sun is high,
But when it is dark he wants a roof to keep away the sky.

If you call a gypsy a vagabond, I think you do him wrong,
For he never goes a-travelling but he takes his home along.
And the only reason a road is good, as every wanderer knows,
Is just because of the homes, the homes, the homes to which it goes.

They say that life is a highway and its milestones are the years,
And now and then there's a toll-gate where you buy your way with tears.
It's a rough road and a steep road and it stretches broad and far,
But at last it leads to a golden Town where golden Houses are.

                                                                     Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886 - 1918)

Thanks for reading, take care if you're out there, Pam x

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Retirement - Bring It On!

I looked forward to retiring at sixty, as many of us did, and then, a bolt from the blue took away plans and wishes and sat firmly on our state pension for another six years. I’m there now and I still haven’t received the explanatory letter ‘sent to everyone’ when the changes were made. WASPI (Women Against State Pension Inequality) campaigns and protests seem to have been sympathetically listened to in some quarters – Jeremy Corbyn, when Labour leader, said that women were “misled”, the situation “needed to be put right” and “We owe a moral debt to these women.” It was included in the Labour party manifesto. Even if nothing changed, it was going to be looked into. The flicker of hope died with the election result.

Anyway, politics aside, my time has come and I’m trying to decide exactly when to hand in my keys and cross myself off any rotas. I’ve spent lots of time at home during the pandemic, shielding at the beginning, then having to isolate a couple of times when I eventually returned to work.  I like being at home. It’s been good getting a feel for life in retirement and spending more time with my husband who retired early a few years ago.  In normal circumstances we would enjoy the freedom of having lunch out, seeing friends and spending more time with family. These things will come back to us, hopefully before too long. I reduced my hours at work so I’m actually at home more than I’m there, yet I still can’t wait to leave.

I yearn for the freedom to just go where I want, when I want without having to plan in advance and ask permission. Deciding one day that we’re off to Scotland, or anywhere the next day, is the life for me. Spending summer afternoons reading in the garden was bliss last year and I look forward to doing it again. I knit and crochet a lot and love making baby clothes so with a current baby boom going on amongst colleagues at the moment I’ve been  a one woman cottage industry.  My writing has been on a back burner for too long. I was trying to use shielding and isolating time to write a best-selling novel or a brilliant TV series, but they’ve both been done, not by me, by the way, and I’ve been struggling to concentrate lately.  There are lots of things on my retirement list and I certainly won’t get bored. I might get fat(ter) on home-made baking, but never bored. I’ll enjoy finding out who I am, so let’s bring it on.

My poem,

When I can please myself on what I want to do each day
Without the stress and strain of doing my job in the way,
I will take time to rest, to think and to learn who I am,
Apart from a wife, a mother and a nanna called Pam.

My wardrobe’s full of Marks and Spencers matching navy blues,
Formal skirts and cardies and some uniform slim-line trews.
Tunic length NHS blouses, navy with polka dots,
Pockets stuffed with tissues and hair-ties, a tangle of knots.

Let’s get rid of such strict clothing and find a nice, new style,
Dresses, ear-rings, beads and things I haven’t worn in a while.
Skinny jeans, knee-high boots and a home-made Aran sweater,
My family and freedom will soon make me feel better.

I’ll wear long, floaty skirts and lipstick, and I’ll paint my nails,
I’ll join in with other WASPI girls on some campaign trails
And hope some good may come of it, though it’s too late for me
So many ‘50s women need to set their pensions free.

PMW 2021

Thanks for reading, stay safe, Pam x

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Yellow - Daffodils

Yellow is the colour of sunshine, something there is so little of in these bleak, January days. Thinking of yellow and sunshine brings back treasured memories of my childhood and Nanna Hetty’s spotless, shiny kitchen in her bungalow at Heald Green. Perhaps the cupboards were yellow, or the Formica topped table, I’ll never remember, but the coffee pot with the pointed handle definitely was. I don’t think for one moment it was a Clarice Cliff, but whenever I see one it reminds me of Nanna’s sunny kitchen, her delicious fruit cake and the perfect scrambled eggs she made for me.

I hope that sunshine isn’t too far away. It’s almost impossible to imagine when it’s so cold, there’s scarce daylight from a dark grey sky and everlasting rain. Dreich. And, there is still the Covid pandemic hanging over us all.

Being surrounded by such doom and gloom at the moment, my recent choice of television viewing, BBC 4’s The Victorian Slum could be considered questionable. To give a brief outline, modern day families have taken up the challenge of living in the slum building exactly as the Victorian slum dwellers did, cramped in one room, two if it could be afforded and with the most basic of facilities. The lucky ones who found daily unskilled work could earn a meagre amount of money, every penny needed for rent and food. In the beginning, it is 1860, moving along a decade with each episode, exploring changes and differences and the hardship each family faces. Social history is very much my thing, so I’m glued to it and at the same time, thankful that I’m living now and not then. The only cheerful looking things were the artificial flowers that the children were making to sell. Within the slum is a doss house, somewhere to sleep, nothing more, for a penny or fourpence a night. The next step down is the workhouse.

One thing leads to another so with my head full of slum life in the 1860s I did some Google research on workhouses in the U.K. at that time. I was instantly transported to Bristol workhouse to be horrified at how people were treated so cruelly yet fascinated at what I was reading. The uniform for unmarried, pregnant women was a red tunic style dress. Prostitutes wore yellow. I smiled eager to share this snippet of information.

Don’t bother to tell me that’s how it was in all workhouses, not just Bristol.

Dad’s favourite colour was yellow. His mother was my Nanna Hetty, so maybe the colour yellow had significance. It was at Easter time when he suddenly passed away. Daffodils in full bloom filled each side of the front path that curved from the drive to the door. They became symbolic. Each year, I plant daffodils in remembrance of him, making sure there are some rich yellow ones. Some Tete-a-Tete are already in bud.

My poem,

Bristol Workhouse, 1860

I smoothed the cotton as I sat, and thought
Who wore this dress before me?
What became of her? Good fortune or death?
What happened to set her free?

Others were watching me, nudging, judging,
Nodding and whispering low.
My nervous hands gathered the threadbare skirt
As I glanced along the row.

Young women, not much older than children,
Some were dressed in washed-out red
With swollen bellies straining at the seams.
Those, the sinful un-wedded.

And me, I needed to feed my children
And pay the over-due rent.
There was no other way I could recoup
Money I shouldn’t have spent.

So I stood in the doorway, shoulders bare,
Brassing it out, being bold.
Closing my mind to demands of the men
While I shivered with the cold.

There’s no love lost in the Bristol Workhouse.
Pleading eyes, tear-stained faces
Cut no ice with those in authority
Looking down on the disgraced.

Downfall has brought me to sit here in a
Faded yellow dress of shame.
Of all the men who happily paid me,
No one even knew my name.

PMW 2021

Thanks for reading. Stay safe and keep well, Pam x

 

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Who You Gonna Call? - Not a Local M.P.

Who you gonna call?  Best friend? Tradesman?  I suppose it depends on the nature of the crisis, what anger needs venting or what message needs to be passed on, but it won’t be my local MP, that’s for sure.

I miss seeing my close friend. Isolating through this pandemic has prevented us from our usual stuff of meeting up, having train-trip days out and being ladies who lunch. Our lengthy phone calls have saved my sanity as we’ve discussed our families,  put the world to rights and talked about what we might do and where we might go when we can taste freedom.

We need our friends and we need our help network of doctor, dentist, RAC or similar and tradesmen. It’s good to have the numbers of known, reliable or well-recommended people to count on in times of need.

One morning we woke up to discover the bathroom floor awash. At some time since four a.m. – the time could be pin-pointed because it was fine when one of us nipped to the loo – the bracket holding the concealed toilet cistern had broken. The cistern dropped below the ballcock, so water continued to run. The wet bathroom was nothing compared to the room below, where water streamed down the wall, dripped along the ceiling and gushed from the light-fitting. The new carpet was sodden and the wallpaper had taken on a bubble effect.  Hearing the voice of our regular plumber on the other end of the phone was bliss. Within the hour he had diagnosed the problem, fetched parts and fixed it, our hero. The Vax worked wonders on the carpet and the wall, ceiling and light were left to dry out.

Another time, we had an electrical problem. It is going back a bit to when both kids were at home. Everyone could smell something horrid in the hallway. Everyone except me – I have no sense of smell. The meter cupboard is there and was thought to be the culprit, except that everything was fine, nothing felt hot, no sign of a problem, no dead rat. The smell was described as fishy and strong. I remembered that sort of smell coming from a plug socket in one of the places I’d lived, which turned out to be a problem with the wiring and nearly caused a fire. We sent for the electrician. The problem, for indeed there was one, turned out to be wrong wiring for the electric shower. We hadn’t made the connection of the smell being apparent when the shower was in use. It needed a higher current cable. Having it replaced led to us having a modern fuse box installed. The expense was worth the peace of mind.

Sometimes, it isn’t a professional we need, it’s the comforting voice of a family member or friend, especially if there’s a bit of news worth sharing, or wanting someone else’s opinion on something. I’ve been feeling angry the last few days. I’m not alone. I have a strong dislike, even hatred for my local MP, well, perhaps that’s unfair because I don’t know the man, but I hate everything he stands for and the party he belongs to. He’s wound me up previously on a work-related matter that I can’t share – I wish I could – but this time he’s gone for broke. He should be aware of his constituency and therefore the extent of needy families in this town. I’m furious because he voted against free meals for children during school holidays.

I definitely need to call my friend. She’ll understand.

My poem, A Question to a Local Conservative MP

Perhaps I should phone you

But what would I say

Without extreme fury

Getting in the way?

 

I don’t want to be a troll

Swiping out at you.

I want to know the reasons

Behind what you do.

 

Some fam’lies in this town

Need a helping hand.

They are your constituents,

Don’t you understand?

 

Don’t you want to help the kids?

Tell me, are you blind?

I’m aware of the hardship

Made worse by your kind.

 

Take a good look at yourself.

Liking what you see?

Misguided by the Tories

Is how you look to me.

 

PMW 2020

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x 

  

 

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Petrichor - The Lost Fragrance of Rain

Yesterday I walked home from my hospital appointment. It felt so good to be out in the fresh air of tree-lined East Park Drive. I had reached the zoo before I dared to remove my face mask and take deep breaths. This was only my second outside venture on foot since I began to emerge from lockdown and my self-isolating. I was enjoying the freedom.

Being inside the hospital made me feel anxious and uncomfortable, and present circumstances of pandemic meant I had to go it alone. It began on Thursday night when a recurring eye problem, which had troubled me for a few days, took a turn for the worst, completely out of my control and I had no choice but to seek proper help. The 111 helpline referred me to A&E. I was scared, it was the last place I wanted to be. I was in pain from my eye. I felt sick, unsure if it was the pain or anxiety of where I was and not being able to see properly. Blood tests showed my blood sugar was all over the place, my potassium level too low and I was a bit dehydrated. Well, it was after midnight, I was scared, tired, should have been in bed, so I’m not surprised.  I wasn’t offered a drink of water or a banana, but I was looked after very well and as always, I have lots of praise for our NHS. They gave me medication and wanted me back the next morning, Friday, in the eye clinic. On Friday they nodded approval, changed the meds and wanted me back in clinic on Monday afternoon, yesterday. Now they’ve got me, they won’t let me go. I’m on follow-up now for August.

I think it had rained during the morning. I couldn’t really remember. I was concerned about returning to clinic, being there on my own, but I had things to do before two of my grandchildren arrived. Busy Monday, but everything fell into place. My husband dropped me at Outpatients, kids in tow, and returned home to await my call.

I was so glad to be out, reasonably unscathed, and the outside air was very welcoming. I phoned to say I would walk. I only live about twenty minutes brisk walk, or half an hour stroll away. Apart from the noisy traffic, it is an enjoyable path, even more so when you can see where you’re going properly. I’d been administered eye drops and was still under the influence of them. My only problem was overhanging plants along the side of the golf course which I mainly managed to dodge, but didn’t see some of the thin stalks until it was too late. No harm done.

 Everywhere was green and lush. I tried to remember or imagine what it all smelt like. I decided it was fresh and clean, earthy with a hint of pine. I don’t know if my sense of smell will ever return. We’ll see. That’s chemo for you. If it does come back, I hope I will experience petrichor and recognise it.

My poem is a memory of the rain-soaked garden at a relative's home.

I remember when life had fragrance,

Everything from a distinctive scent

To a subtle hint of a substance,

Breathing through, delicate, transient.

The warm sweetness after summer rain

Drenched the rose garden and swamped the lawn.

Leaves and petals floated to the drain,

Sweet peas, bedraggled, soggy, forlorn.

Drips from the sycamore and the beech

Splashing puddles on the patio.

Drooping honeysuckle, out of reach.

Sodden wisteria hanging low.

I remember the heady perfume

Of old-fashioned roses in full bloom.

The smell of rain I knew before,

But not the proper name, petrichor.

Pamela Winning 2020

Thanks for reading, keep safe, Pam x

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After The Gold Rush

This Digging blog has undergone more revisions in just three days than that more famous blog by the infamous Dominic Cummings (hereinafter referred to as the Dominator). At least I made all my changes before I pressed the 'publish' button and not afterwards. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I'll enlighten you later.

 

In my last few posts, I've steered clear of the overtly political stuff in recognition that these are sensitive times. Some several of you have subsequently urged me to tell it like I see it and so today I shall - but in as reasoned and objective a way as I can. It's an informed summary of what I've been hearing, seeing, thinking about Britain in the pandemic over the last few weeks.

 

If you're a regular reader of these Saturday splurges, you'll know I have scant - correction, make that - no respect for Boris Johnson. Educated at Eton (he left with a chip on his shoulder because they didn't consider him worthy to be Head of School) and Oxford (another chip or two because his brother and sister both got better degrees, being brighter than BoJo), Johnson went into journalism like so many toffs of his generation (Michael Gove is another) before throwing his oversized hat into the political arena - his eye on the ultimate prize, 10 Downing Street. David Cameron, for whom I have no great liking either, tried to block Johnson's progression by routing him into a role as Mayor of London . There BoJo bathed in the success of the 2012 Olympics, although all the real work had been done by his predecessor. His more lasting legacy, Boris bikes and the tax burden of that Garden Bridge vanity project which cost Londoners £300 million paid to crony consultants of the Mayor with nothing to show for it at the end of the day. (More recently he mooted a bridge linking the UK mainland with Northern Ireland - an idea which civil engineers soon debunked as technically infeasible).

 

His first bid for the PM job failed when he and Gove stabbed each other in the proverbial back in their clamour, allowing Theresa May to sweep in from the cornfields. She, too, tried to keep BoJo quiet by giving him the job of Foreign Secretary - where he proved quite the worst one in living memory, according to insiders who tired of his lack of gravitas, poor attention to detail and disastrous gaffes - as Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe (still in an Iranian jail because of his blunder) will attest. The problem with Boris is that he's an opportunist with no real convictions except for an overweening belief that he deserves the top job. When his senior civil servant at the Foreign Office was asked about what the consequences of Johnson ever getting to No. 10 might be he replied: "If he was not expected to run anything, it could work." Heaven help us! 

 

BoJo's complete lack of integrity, coupled with his eagerness to reach the top just for the kudos of being there, was shown when he switched his natural allegiance from being pro-Remain (natural because of his German and Turkish ancestry before his grandparents came to the UK) to staunch Brexiteer almost overnight in 2016.  Dominic Cummings, sorry, the Dominator, who had spent some years grooming Michael Gove and shaping his political career as Education Secretary (and what a scourge of the profession that turned out to be) was looking for another soft touch to further his own power agenda - much more on that shortly. He seized on Johnson, laying out before BoJo the plan by which he could rise to power on a populist surge if he would only front the Leave campaign. Johnson signed his Faustian pact with the Dominator and the latter master-minded the rest, including snappy slogans like that lie on the side of the big red bus (about how Britain sends £350 a week to the EU which could be spent on the NHS) or the 'Get Brexit Done' mantra - simple slogans to con the common man and woman, working this in tandem with the stealthy political annihilation over time of key opponents within the Tory party (Ken Clarke and Theresa May, obviously, more recently Sajid Javid).

 

As for the Dominator himself, he took the arrogant view that politicians were a bunch of monkeys and the political system was a cumbersome and failing mechanism ripe for a makeover, not in the interests of democracy and the social fabric, you understand, but in the interests of the ruling elite. (He's a big fan of Otto von Bismarck is the Dominator.)  It was his ambition to "run Number 10 one day" as he expressed it to colleagues; and since December's Tory landslide victory he's been doing just that as puppet-master to the Bloviator. That, by the way, is my word of the week thanks to Susie Dent. A bloviator is: a speaker of empty rhetoric and blower of hot air; someone who talks a lot but says very little. So there you have it, the Bloviator and his Dominator. Via the Brexit Referendum and the most recent general election, we the British people have wittingly or otherwise set this bunch of  rainbow dung beetles up on top of the shit pile and they were all set to go digging for the pot of gold - when along came Covid-19. It hasn't stopped them, merely given them a whole new set of opportunities.

 

Rainbow Dung Beetle Looking For The Pot Of Gold

What a hash the UK government has made of our response to the pandemic. I know some of you who read this blog are football fans. I was amused by this football analogy précis from Jeremy Warner (in the Daily Telegraph; yes, I keep an eye on the right-wing press as well): "In the UK, we seem to have approached the crisis with the nonchalant arrogance of the gifted amateur who turns up late for the match, has to borrow his boots from the coach, and in his delusion still expects to score the winning goal."

 

Yet even that jibe paints a dangerously false picture, one of well-intentioned, albeit bumbling, incompetence. As one digs for the truth, it turns out to be a whole lot more sinister and calculated than that!

 

Back in late 2018, the Global Health Security Index ranked the UK second best in the world (behind the USA) in terms of countries being ready with systems in place to face a possible pandemic. So what went wrong this year?

 

Simply this - the leaders (governments) of both the US and the UK chose not to implement those systems. Why? It was partly a combination of arrogance and incompetence (as suggested above) but also naked economic strategy. Remember Johnson's (and Trump's) bluster about it being just like flu, about the need to build up 'herd immunity', those media moments of BoJo walking around hospital wards shaking hands with Covid-19 patients? The government claimed to be watching what happened in Italy and Spain and to be deferring to scientific advice. Only when it suited them, it seems.

 

If the UK's lockdown had been put in place even ten days earlier than it was, it is calculated that the number of deaths would have been reduced by 30,000! As it was, the UK delayed acting and the prime minister himself was dragged allegedly to death's door by the invisible foe. Now that nearly was "project last gasp", as BoJo so insensitively named the scramble to build ventilators! Even after lockdown became policy, there were further cynical decisions made: to send old people with Covid-19 back to their care homes, which for the most part were equally unprepared to cope with the problem; to not pursue an aggressive track and trace agenda.

 

As a consequence, as it stands today the UK currently has the second highest Covid-19 death toll in the world (38,000 'officially tested' - though the real figure is over 60,000) with the US way out in front and Brazil - another country badly run by an arrogant populist - coming up fast in third place.

 

Along the way there have been constant complaints that frontline health workers didn't have the right or enough personal protective equipment, that testing was insufficient, that track and trace had  not been implemented. Behind the scenes, some of the facts are these:

 

1) that the government had been undermining the UK's 'pandemic readiness' rating by deliberately running down stocks of PPE over many months, migrating to a 'just in time' system with monopoly contracts put out to favoured private companies  - a purely economic decision that was to have a dire knock-on effects, including huge waste of money on PPE that wasn't up to spec and thousands of doctors, nurses and care workers having to struggle on with insufficient protection.

 

2) that the UK's sample testing capability was also in the throes of being privatised - another economic decision favouring companies whose owners and directors were no strangers to the high and mighty in the Tory party - and those labs proved not up to the task.

 

3) that the provision of the testing kits themselves suffered the same logistical issues - all out to private tender, companies being awarded contracts for which they were not geared up, sub-contracting et cetera et cetera and struggling with a fragmented supply chain. We never did make the 100,000 tests a day by the end of April. It was all misinformation.

 

As for track and trace, eventually the sense of doing this was conceded and apparently it's finally live now - but hundreds of people who are meant to be manning it don't know what they're supposed to be doing, can't access the system reliably and it will probably be July before it's working as intended.

 

That this bat shit week began with BoJo's special advisor holding a press conference in the rose garden of Number 10 - an unelected government advisor addressing the nation from the Prime Minister's residence no less - was simply one more unprecedented first in these unprecedented times. He subjected us to a rambling and dubious spiel which included the complaint that "all the press are giving misinformation about my whereabouts."

 

The Dominator was there because he'd been found out breaking his own lockdown rules, by driving his wife and son from London to Durham. (This was after his wife had said she had symptoms and yet Cummings still went in to work!) His wife (Mary Wakefield) had written a column in the Spectator about how they were all 'self-isolating' - she just omitted to mention that it was 260 miles north of the capital in their second home (that's right, Cummings is on the title deeds of North Lodge). Also, Mary's father is a baronet and her parents live in a castle in Northumberland. Oh, and that Cummings farm near Durham has received over £250,000 in EU farming subsidies. 

 

Then there was the whole Barnard Castle fiasco on his wife's birthday and the fact that on his return to London, the Dominator then updated a blog from last year to insert his prediction about and concern over a possible coronavirus pandemic - a deliberate re-writing of history that he chose to use in his rose garden defence submission. He's been caught out talking shit and it was embarrassing to see the apologists squirming at the rostrum and on twitter in his defence. He refused to resign, though others similarly compromised had been forced to do so recently. Worse than that, perhaps, he refused to apologise or concede he had done anything wrong. It was the height of arrogance and a 20/20 crystal clear demonstration of his elitist attitude and cynical contempt for the rest of us.



After The Gold Rush

Of course BoJo came under pressure to sack his special advisor. Of course he resisted. Without the Dominator he has no plan and no clue what to do for the best. It's also no coincidence that Michael Gove also leapt to Cummings' defence over 'eyesight worries'. As for BoJo's comment about himself needing glasses in the wake of Covid-19, that's just more subterfuge - he's been using them for years when not in the public eye.

All of these actions have been pursued in the name of an agenda that seeks to remove the traditional barriers/ checks/ balances between government (which is supposed to act in the will of the people) and the corrupting power of money. It is an agenda that is permitting privatisation and profiteering, not just in health and social care but across the spectrum, to an unprecedented degree. It is the gold rush agenda, the Dominator's master plan with lovable, shambling BoJo as its cheer-leader.

Even now, on the week-end before restrictions are eased, expert medical opinion is that lockdown is being lifted too soon and that a second wave of infections is inevitable. The release is being made for economic reasons and while I have huge sympathy with the ordinary businesses that are suffering, one thing is for sure - there are private companies in the pharma, testing and software sectors that are making a great fortune via government contracts right now out of our collective misfortune, all as a result of deliberate Tory economic policy over the last few years. That's the gold rush underway in the dung heap, and Brexit means the profiteers will not be impacted by new tax laws the EU has in the pipeline. The rich will go on getting even richer. The NHS (pride of the nation) will likely suffer the effects of further privatisation as the US squeezes it in return for a trade deal. And the poor will go on getting poorer - or die. So far, no one has mentioned the cost saving of allowing the old to go to the wall, but I wouldn't be surprised if  it's in someone's financial spread-sheet somewhere.

 

Finally, we had Sir Alan Sugar, beating on about how we should all be pulling together, bulldog spirit et cetera and as for "these journalists - it is time you all changed your negative and political rhetoric for the health of this nation and start supporting our government" instead of digging the dirt. My riposte to his appeal is a straight forward one. I think he misunderstands or deliberately misrepresents both the nature of the mess we're in, the reason for us being in it and the legitimate role of "these journalists" in reporting and commenting upon the situation. If that was his calculated bid to become Lord Amstrad, then I'm sorry Alan Sugar - you're fired!

As one very witty placard put it this week: "First they came for the journalists. Then we didn't know what was happening anymore." Beware!

We should not let these cynical and manipulative people get away with what they are doing. There's a very bad smell there. They are in the process of making themselves unaccountable as well as criminally wealthy. This is the rise of the oligarchs. I just hope the British public can finally see them for what they are. The pity of it is that they were ever considered delectable in the first instance.

As you're still with me on this one, here's my Rose Garden poem, the latest from the imaginarium, with a nod both to Wiley Publishing and Arthur Lee...

Ventriloquism For Dummies
The roses wait, damask pink, blood red, pale yellow.
He's late for his own shit show, modern Machiavelli.

When he protests his innocence with a hint of a sneer,
says his hands are clean, we know where they've been.

He's the one who's driving this runaway train with an arm
up the Clown Prince and both feet squarely in the gravy.

He took us for fools, this orchestrator of mummery,
whose pillow-book is Ventriloquism for Dummies.

But he's pissed up his own script this time, overstepped
as arrogance will, a transgression we should not forgive

nor forget:  one rule for his kind, another for the herd.
Let us pray his best days are surely behind him now.

As he walks off, petals drift to the ground like tears
from floribunda and hybrid tea and one can almost hear

him calling "Look out BoJo, I'm falling, no one cares
for me, cares for me, signed D.C."  And the ghosts

of sixty thousand dead audibly sigh in the rose garden,
willing us to harden our hearts against such calumny.

Okay, I've told it like I see it. What, then, after the gold rush? We can take rainbow hope from two things - one, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, that every shit-storm eventually runs out of shit; and two - that the Labour Party once again has an electable leader.

Thanks for reading. Have a good week. Stay safe, Steve ;-)

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