The Mad POTUS

Completely potty POTUS. I used to think we could laugh him off. Ignorant, babbling, tweeting, mad Trump. I forgot that he was also evil, and that the American people, in their infinite electoral wisdom,  had presented him with unassailable power. (Not unlike our own masochistic workers in the North.) Now he is is threatening world peace and nobody knows where to look. His cohort of hawks will pull the strings and the President will sway on his feet, make his finger and thumb into a circle, and pronounce.
 
   We get profundities from the likes of Jeremy Hunt. Apparently, nobody can predict what will happen next  in Iraq. We need a failed Conservative leadership candidate to tell us that? Johnson, of course, is keeping well out of it.

   The PM is probably recovering from a fortnight in Mustique. He needs to pause and see if he can think at all before opening his mouth. And he has to pass a comb through his hair. Or, maybe, Cummings is not available to tell Johnson what to say. He, now, is busy devising strategy for new Civil Service appointments. He's busy.

   Where are all the big names in our Tory mis-government? We have our soldiers in Iraq, likely to be assaulted.  Has no one of those gloating Tories anything to say? Like Trump made a huge miscalculation. Like the President needs to draw his claws in.

  We have enough natural disasters in the world now without man-made ones joining the act. Australia burns, S E Asia drowns. Though the media is not giving much airtime to the drowning Asians.

   I suspect the world has gone into a masochistic phase. Why would a working class electorate in the North of England vote Tory otherwise? Why would a tolerant Indian population get fixated on religion and Modi? And why indeed Trump?

   In my most despairing moments I tell myself -- you just get on with your reading and writing, Anand. It's cold, but on dry days you can still do a walk in the garden with Lily, the dog, running around with unexpected joy. Five years will go quickly by; we should be wondering how we can help the folks who have shot themselves in the foot handing their fate over to Johnson.

   We gave up on a good leader, who stood for equality and fairness. Now we, the Labour Party want to elect ANOTHER leader. What was wrong with Corbyn? We can't blame him for the BREXIT debacle. Labour is full of promising leadership aspirants, I hope they have plans for what to do for the next five years. And not just for themselves or the Party.
 

Don't Blame Racism on Football

Don't Blame Racism on Football:

That sorts out the problem -- it's all because of football.  Now we can forget about all the myriad places and situations where racism rears its ugly, stupid head, making me ashamed that I am also British.

   I should know -- I came here first in the fifties when it was hard to find somewhere to live if you were brown like me. I stayed in homes belonging to other Indians. The next time I came to The United Kingdom (united??) was in 1966. Not much had changed but if there was a trend, it was for the better. I was still forced to rent from other Indians, but I felt less out of place. I stayed a year that time and learned how to get past the obstacles, which all non-whites had to circumvent. Without mentioning it.

After that I came in 1974. Things were distinctly better. There was a Council for immigrants and they gave me advice about work permits and residents' rights. The Home Office was pretty unco-operative. But Being a Maths teacher my kind of person was very much in demand. Like nurses and doctors now. Fluent English and a warped sense of humour helped though friends said I sounded Bombay-Welsh. I survived - just.

   In the Maths department in which I worked, in Essex, there were nineteen members of staff. The only two with degrees in Maths were the Head of Department and myself. But I was firmly made to understand that no promotions would come my way -- don't aspire beyond Scale 2. My H O D had occasional nervous breakdowns; I was then expected to teach his classes, order books, help other teachers... Some of our Maths staff were Geography teachers or Needlework teachers and didn't know any Maths.

   They were nice people without pretensions. One would bring me x and y equations to solve, one at a time. He did not know that you needed two equations to solve for x and y. Another worried about Vectors and Matrices. She had never come across them in Needlework. What were Unit Matrices about? And I would try to help, all the while glorying in that beautiful, inter-connected edifice, which was Maths at its best. I remember trying to explain Pascal's Triangle to a Maths teacher and the connection with the Binomial expansion. This was S M P Maths and all this was expected. PIE IN THE SKY!

   Racism made sure that I never got a promotion, but I was not to mention that word. I could like it or lump it. Eventually I left to teach in Inner London where brown is an accepted hue.

   AND THERE WAS NOT A FOOTBALLER IN SIGHT THEN IN MY SCHOOL.

   Racism starts at home. And flourishes in school. The only way to stop it is to start where it begins -- home and school. By the time the fans come to watch Spurs it's established like a wart om your body. Now it needs surgery.

   Indeed, no child is born racist. Home and school make it so. Don't blame football. The black players are flourishing in all teams and long may that last.

   As an educationist, you must expect me to believe all social miracles are made in schools.  My only consolation is that today's young are so much more liberal than earlier generations.

SAD!

Today I am very, very sad at the state of our country. We have a Kefuffle -Pfeffel (OMG) for a PM. we have a few tail-waggers around him, ready to hound the poor, the sick, the immigrant, any way they can, and we are leaving the EU. God knows people like me will not be bankrupted, starving or deported because of BREXIT. But the rough-sleepers, the single mothers, the crazy working North, which has always carried the manufacturing burden of our Southern luxuries -- what is going to happen to them?

And the NHS???

I am sad, pessimistic and without hope. 

Corbyn

Jeremy Corbyn is a very rare individual, who has compassion, integrity and clearsightedness. He can lose as many elections as happens, but I am on his side.

Jeremy Corbyn's policies were ways forward for a fairer distribution of wealth and opportunities -- of course the Tories don't like him. All the lies in creation cannot change facts: Boris is a compulsive liar, lacking in empathy and compassion.

Corbyn will step down as leader, but I hope the policies he stood for will find voice with the new Labour leader. No, I don't want centrist fluffing. Stand for what we believe in -- which is a country that works for all, irrespective of situation, age, education level or employment.

We must not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The Christmas Conundrum

Today I gave a friend of mine a book. A gift, I said, but not a Christmas gift. I've decided to abolish Christmas this year, I said. All that waste of money, time, paper... Now , all but about 0.002 of my friends are Christian, so I'm going to lose a few. Heck -- I am just concerned about the state of our exploited and abused world. Not as much as that amazing Greta, but quite a lot.

Who is Christmas good for? I ask myself:
The turkeys ???? I rest my case.
Pine trees - mmm... I don't think so.
The amazon rain forests? Definitely not.

Maybe the traders, but they could trade on the internet anyway. Most of us punters BUY on the web. So that scenario is undergoing a huge somersault. The kaleidoscope started shaking a few years ago and now it is in a state of a major earthquake. Big players totter and fall, like Thomas Cook.

So, I've told my family I'm not buying gifts this year. Friends too, but  am keeping that little bit of Christmas tidings for later. I might buy Christmas hampers for them if I can afford it, or even the food in the hampers without the packaging.

If a friend or their children need something, that's different. If someone needs their fifteenth warm scarf or tenth pajama set, I might consider it. Reluctantly.

This year I am obsessed by two things -- the state of our planet and the rough sleepers on our street. Would the young people curled up on the pavements prefer two weeks of a berth in a room somewhere, OR, one slap-up Christmas meal? I don't know the answer to that one? What would that bearded Arab who started a whole, world-wide religion have to say about that? He of the loaves and fishes (but not roast turkey, crackers and the Queen's speech.)

You can see how confused I am.  There are so many huge buildings,vacant for ninety percent of time. Churches, temples, school halls and buildings during the cold holidays. Not to mention the absent foreign owners with their multiple empty mansions. We could even start with Westminster during recesses. We could throw all our extra duvets and warm clothes and Christmas jumpers in for good measure.

If the world needs to be saved, it cannot be done by the posturing idiots in the climate conference. They haven't grown up yet. Every one of us has to consider how we can help, what we can give up, to make the change. People action is the only kind of action, which seems tow work long-time.

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!