Marmite

A mate of mine emailed me the other day as follows: “I’ve just been notified of two new letters on my son’s High School website - I read them in order of timing, they were a minute or so apart. The first one gave notice of strike action by teachers on 5th and 7th July. The second was two pages long and gave dire warnings about attendance levels and the correlation with academic achievement.” The logical conclusion we both drew from these letters is that wilfully preventing a child from being educated is morally reprehensible, especially when those doing the preventing are the providers of said education and know without doubt that their actions are damaging the children.

This morning, I was enjoying my usual pre-breakfast WhatsApp-fest with my very good friend H, swapping Wordle scores and animal anecdotes: she has a dog and two cats; I had two hares, one bunny and a murder of magpies in the back garden. Yes, I know that’s not the correct collective noun, but it is for crows, and magpies are part of the crow family, and I wanted to murder the magpies because they were chasing the bunny. I notice they didn’t chase the hares, probably because the hares would have boxed their cowardly heinies to kingdom come.

A quick scan of Saturday’s Times to find a topic to blog about opened the floodgates, and by that I don’t mean the combined sewer overflows, although I touch on those later. Starting off with a doozie,  "Roxy Music model fights to stay after 73 years in UK" . An ex-model, married to someone related to someone famous, didn’t get her act together and is now threatened with deportation from Blighty. She didn’t get her act together and Brexit is blamed. I woke up in agony this morning with cramp in my calf – curse Brexit for that as well, eh? I admit that deportation for an accidental lapse of paperwork, by a seemingly harmless, law-abiding, if tedious, individual who’s lived here legally and peaceably most of her life, is a tad harsh, especially when the authorities turn a blind eye to others who intentionally ditch their paperwork so they can land here illegally. That’s not the fault of Brexit but of shoddy implementation and oversight by Mandarins pre-occupied with their rejo...

I woke up very early this morning, early as in 4.06am. Really wide awake. Feeling a little sad? low? Melancholy. Not because of health or other obvious reasons, but because Boris and Nadine have resigned as MPs, and the world of politics, if not the world itself, just got a bit more boring, a tad less colourful. Stale. For all their faults, I can't help liking both of them and am more tolerant of their failings and wrongdoings than I should be. Contrast that with my knee-jerk criticism of others, who probably don’t deserve it, well not all of it. Just as I’m willing to either disbelieve ill of, or forgive, Boris and Nadine (and Sir Jacob and Dame Priti), so I lap up the malicious gossip in the Daily Mail of the likes of Starmer, Sturgeon, whoever took over from her, the Lib Dem non-descript, and the Green thingy. Why?

This week, I saved the NHS a few quid, freed up several appointments for those in greater need, and emitted less carbon than I might have done. According to some, that was terribly wrong of me.  Say what? My crime was to go private, to eschew the money-blackhole behemoth that is the NHS, to jump the queue, to seek advantage over others because there was room on Hubby’s credit card. Needless to say, I don’t see it like that. For me, I was exercising my freedom of choice, and supporting wider society by tangibly helping the NHS and its patients. Polish my halo.

I recently remembered that a blog-fan had suggested I write something about a well-known passage from the Old Testament. What prompted my Total Recall was attending Sunday morning Chapel at my old college, with a thumping hangover and an unwelcome surprise. The surprise was that instead of a sermon, the chaplain announced that we would have a group discussion about the two readings (from Acts and Luke). Given that there were only four of us in the congregation, any silence from me would be well-noticed. I usually have an opinion about everything, even the Bible, but that morning I didn’t feel too bright, or brave. As it happens, I managed to hone in on the language as being too negative for the message and would either confuse or demotivate devotees. That thought seemed to floor everyone, which means it was either an excellent point or a really daft one.

This blog title is inspired by the famous spiritual song that was itself inspired by Ezekiel 37:1–14, where the prophet Ezekiel visits the Valley of Dry Bones and prophesies that they (the people of Israel in exile) will one day be resurrected at God's command. The connection to this blog is either superficial or very deep and cryptic. Reader's choice. It seemed like a good idea at the time, eating, drinking and chatting, dinosaur skeletons watching every move, perhaps waiting to pounce (the dinosaurs, not me). The venue was the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, much more alluring than an Ivy or a Stein or a Ramsay, and the service was better too.