Turkeys Cheering for Christmas??

Do Turkeys Count the Days to Christmas??
Swinson and Umunna keep saying Jeremy Corbyn is not fit to be P M. No reasons given. The closest they got to a reason, recently, is that he is indecisive. What is indecisive about clearly reiterating many times that a deal will be negotiated within the first three months of a Labour government, then the deal will be put to the country in a referendum? On this ballot Remain will stay an option. Is that not crystal-clear? Clearer than the nebulous border in the Irish sea, which exists now and then? And totally fair considering that no one knew anything about the repercussions of a Leave decision in 2015. Details are only slowly trickling in recently with businesses picking up and escaping from the country, closing down...
   Swinson hasn't got a cat-in-hell chance of becoming P M -- who sold her that bit of self-delusion? Umunna has been around a while -- does he really believe that bit of fairy story?
   The poor in this country are getting poorer, hungrier and hopeless. Labour policies will give hope, and shelter for the rough sleepers, among many other things we have forgotten about -- railways that run on time, water bills and fuel bills that don't rise at the whim of private owners ...
   I've spent most of my adult life in education. What the Tories are doing to education is cruel and casual. They do not care.
   Listening to Conservative voters, I despair.

Girl, Woman, Other -- What a book!

Girl, Woman, Other  by Bernadine Evaristo – A review by Anand Nair

I read this book in two days and towards the end, I was rushing, I couldn’t wait for the next exquisite page, experience, tongue-in-cheek comment on our British society of the twenty-first century, some of whose people are living in a time-warp, scattered over the last seven decades, more or less.

Evaristo’s world is a black world, mainly black female, refusing to be labelled, boxed and stowed away. A day after I finished reading the last page, I started all over again. I do re-read books that I enjoy, but this is the first one I started again a day after I finished it.

Twelve very different women stride these pages with authority. They are the immigrants, mainly from West Africa. their descendants still carrying the handicaps of being ‘other’ in a monochrome fifties Britain. Then they grow, blossom, stake out their territories, artistic, social, sexual or otherwise. They do this with panache, conviction and humour. Men, step aside for a moment, we have a few things to say.

Evaristo’s writing is sharp, wise and mocking. She takes British attitudes to black apart and puts them together in new patterns. There are the women producing plays and battling their way up in the West End jungle, the young girls trying to survive in an more-or-less white campus, and all trying to revel in their sexuality, as varied as their origins. Evaristo follows the hilarious, aspirational, glorious, agonising lives of twelve black women through the fifties and sixties and into now.

What a surprising, heart-warming, glorious, multi-tale!

F... Business

Johnson, disheveled, more so than usual, faced the CBI today. He looked uneasy, stammering too. More and more, I look at him and think, This is our Prime Minister? Which long-ago box in the attic did we pull him out of?
  Corbyn made a well-reasoned speech to the CBI about the need for a second referendum. The leavers of 2016 didn't sign up for a collapsing industrial base and a broken economy, he argued. Again. All CBI wants is a quick resolution of Brexit and throw the bottom of the pot out.
   Arcury surfaced again, but Johnson is not likely to lose any sleep over that tidbit. She is one of many such peccadilloes, we are told, though evidence is still forthcoming of the ones in the shadows. Johnson ruffles his straw hair forward, hides a moment behind it and then looks at his audience. Like a lost little boy. Contrived, I think.
   Meanwhile we have the little schoolgirl in another shift-dress, making her pitch. Lib Dems are the party of business, she insists. If nothing works, a coalition with Tories would let her breathe the sanctified air of the cabinet meetings. And Chuka Umunna would be right there advising her on what to say and what not to say.
   A breath of fresh air is needed. I agree, F... Business!