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!

Lying is a Habit

I have come to the conclusion, watching Boris Johnson duck and dive at questions, which he is not comfortable answering, that lying is an acquired skill. He is trying hard but he is too lazy and incompetent to do it properly. When he lies his body language, his stuttering, hemming and hawing, give him away. 'Go back and repeat that,' I feel like saying to him. 'That's clumsy.' Teaching habits don't die after all.
  At the moment he churns out lists of things his Government is going to do. 30 million trees a year. That's a lot of trees. I can't see him out there with shovel and spade. I can't see Gove there either. A few lessons from Corbyn would come in handy.
  The Press is gleeful - Johnson has gone up a few points in the polls (which are mostly fairy stories anyway.) This was achieved by dropping Farage in deep nitrogenous stuff. (Couldn't happen to a nicer person.)
  Give them time, I think, and the two will destroy each other. They might even do it without help from anyone at all. There's Cummings, his poltergeist, at Johnson's shoulder, remember.
  I wonder -- will we hear about the alleged bribery of Brexit candidates any time soon? Or will it go like the Russia Interference report?
  Our Press has a great deal to answer for.

Priti Patel at her very Smug Best.

Trust Priti Patel to add shabby to confused. What are the immigrants already here to think? Who will be welcomed and who tossed out? Who are the folk who have lived here for decades that are being shown the door?.And the fast-tracking of NHS personnel that Johnson promises -- from where, how many and how soon? Above all what happened to that magic figure of £350,000 million a week floated around by the Leave lobby at the referendum? May did not deliver that to the NHS and Johnson's word is not worth a roll of school toilet paper. The kind like tracing paper which can't wipe anything, leave alone a baby's behind.
   So, today the figures show that A and E waiting times are becoming more lethal with each passing month. Patel can mutter and mumble about immigration all she wants, but the country is concerned about our very special NHS, not the immigration figures right now. Aside from the A and E, the waiting times have increased for everything else too: G P appointments, surgery, test results...
   The Tories are getting a little frantic. In spite of having the PRESS, Television, ONS, Yougov and lying pollsters on their side. A little honesty could come in handy.
   Today I saw a video of Corbyn hugging a woman whose house had been flooded -- she was trying to come to terms with five feet of water in her house. Can you imagine Johnson in that role? He wouldn't know where to begin. Cummings has no advice to give him on that matter because he is another geek bred to luxury. And Johnson has to get instructions from Cummings to breathe.
   I would love the Labour Party to win this election, but I am totally unaware about what the people think -- the obfuscation from the Press is too much. It is like the Tories are writing the headlines for BBC. SAD!!
   This country is desperate for change. I hope the voters realize that Tories will be 'more of the same.' We need Labour to execute policies that will provide more equality, more compasion, and more hope.

My sedentary contribution to the Labour election effort - 1

The one above means that I intend to write a blog every other day; so there will be many more. In the 2010 election I went door-stepping near by my house in posh-Purley all on my own. The dogs barked at me and I retreated in a funk. In 2017, I dropped a few leaflets off in the door flaps. Now I am too feeble to do even that. But I can sit on a chair and express my outrage.
   Yesterday the dirty double was completed -- and what a double. Johnson and Farage. A serial liar and a racist. The racist changes his mind oftener than Chuka Umunna changes parties. And Trump holds the strings. Except for the knighthoods. Who holds the strings there? I wonder.
   I stopped looking at the BBC television news because the bias in favour of Boris Johnson and his Conservatives are so pronounced, I am near to puking. Sky is only marginally better, but there are a few honest journalist there occasionally.
   And as all this is going on, I am wondering about the men, women and children sleeping rough this month and onward in the freezing nights. I am also thinking about the mountain of unnecessary packaging, companies like Amazon and Aladdin will use, to distract from the cost of their goods. There will be tons of bubble-wrap and polystyrene all over the country and wrapping paper enough to build houses with. I wrote a blog about this last year, but my three-and-a-half readers can hardly change the world.
   I was in the West End a month ago and a mother and three babies were camping on the pavement;  the babies were all under five years in age. How did she feed them, bathe them, keep them warm? I tossed her some money to salve my conscience; she was too harassed to notice.
   Once upon a time we were a compassionate country. Now the inequality is obscene.
   Labour will redress the balance. We need the terrible Tories out. OUT. OUT.
   

The Booker Shenanigans

I started reading Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo day before yesterday and finished it at a gallop yesterday evening. It was clever, funny, informed,beautifully written, and brought the whole black experience in our country to life, tongue in cheek. Having lived in Nigeria for five years and in several African countries for a total of twenty-five years of my working life, the book was like going back home.
   A week ago, I read The Testament by Margaret Atwood. Apparently it shared the 2019 Booker prize with Girl, Woman, Other.  The judges decided the two books were so equal in literary merit, so inseparable in this respect, that they had to split the prize and give it to the two women equally.
   I read Booker shortlists as a matter of religion almost. As soon as the list is announced my son will find the lot and stagger in with them. And there have been serious disappointments along the way. Last year's Lincoln in the Bardo was a let down. I enjoyed The Fisherman by Obioma and Arundathi Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Very political, could do with a little less of that, but well-written and researched.
   This year I started with TheTestament. It is arid, directionless, with cardboard characters and situated nowhere. There are no real people or any real place. There is nowhere to go.
   Atwood's Handmaiden was just about readable. I didn't enjoy it, but sometimes I plod through books because I believe I should. I am too low brow, I tell myself; perhaps I need to get used to this level of affected gibberish. The TV series, which I didn't watch made it famous. Did viewers enjoy the titivation of strange sexual mores, situations and the abnegation of women?
   It was a great disservice to Girl, Woman, Other to be bracketed with The Testament. What an outrage!
   Margaret Atwood is in the rarefied company of Carey, Mantell and Coutzee, we are told, having won two Bookers. Those authors wrote books that remain in my memory. I re-read them and marvel at their skill. Atwood, I can pass on any day of the week.