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!

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.