Marmite

Here’s a blog to jumpstart the old brain cells, or kick them into touch. A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in how we think about and understand life, the universe and everything. The replacement of Ptolemy’s earth-centred universe with Copernicus’ sun-centred system is one example; Newtonian mechanics given the heave-ho by Einstein’s relativity is another. If you prefer, it’s when the ultimate answer is no longer 42; it’s 51.

I don’t like Russell Brand. I find him crude, creepy and cretinous. Well, he is a fan of Jeremy Corbyn.

One year ago, her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II died. One day ago, my friend H asked me to write a blog about Britain’s disappearing, or disappeared, work ethic. The late Queen’s work ethic was unparalleled. She never retired. She studied her briefs. She was an example to everyone. The Daily Mail marked the anniversary of her death with accounts of the day, as told by senior guardsmen at the heart of the preparations for her funeral.

In my last blog ( Jelly on a Plate ) I decided that I didn’t “feel sufficiently confident to decide for definite or comment publicly on just how bad the relaxation of the Nutrient Neutrality rules is.” The last couple of days, I’ve read the exchange of letters between the Government and the Office for Environmental Protection (OfEP), extracts from the Levelling up and Regeneration Bill (comically dubbed ‘LURB’) and scanned countless commentaries and soundbites from ‘environmentalists’ that collectively compete with a parrots' enclave. Honestly, I nodded off over my nutrient-loaded, roast (British) beef sandwich. Yes. Beef. Half of the critics of the Government’s environmental policies would cancel Britain’s beef industry and rewild thousands of acres of sweeping pastures with totally inappropriate habitats misinformed by a simplistic ideology that flies in the face of science, history, systems' thinking and pragmatism. 

I had a wobble the other day. A sanity one that is. I went for my usual walk, or at least that’s what I intended to do. Down the lane, round the road, up and down another lane, up and back down a road then retrace my steps home. All on tarmac, albeit Bucks’ tarmac – pockmarked worse than a teenager’s worst nightmare. Not this time. I started off down the lane but, instead of walking past a field opening, I swivelled right and yomped along a farm track, then along a field margin, a few of those actually, until I realised I didn’t know where I was or where I was going. And neither did anyone else.

To escape the 40-degree heat in southern France, Hubby and I took refuge in a medieval chateau that boasted a refreshing 32 degrees. It was nice enough in a National Trust kind of way, and the Gothic-style chapel hosted the usual multiple shrines of multiple saints venerated with multiple flickering candles in a Roman Catholic kind of way. Being the pseudo-Protestant girl that I am, and not to be outdone or intimidated by the Papists, I popped a two-euro coin into the box and lit a tall anorexic candle in memory of Mum and Dad, at the shrine of St George of course. No idea what he was doing in France, other than to undermine Europe, which is why he’s our patron saint, of course. Anyhoo, I placed my candle on the highest row between some older ones and, wherever I wandered in the chapel, Mum and Dad’s candle stood tallest and proudest of the lot. Yes I know that pride is one of the seven deadly sins, but I’m guilty of far worse, so let it go. I don’t light a candle for them in every chu...

Barnsley. The final frontier. To boldly go where no man or woman has gone before and remained sober. I’ve been four times in the past seven weeks. Don’t judge me. I’ve rented a storage unit to store some stuff – cripes this is riveting – in a tatty warehouse on a tatty trading estate in a tatty part of town. It’s convenient and functional, so job done. Several times a day I’ve driven to the warehouse in my Honda Jazz – the little car that thinks it’s a large Tardis – unloaded the boot and trollied several packed boxes up the ramp, down the corridor and into the unit. Repeat X3 until car is empty. One day was different. When I opened the door to collect the trolley, I could hear the most beautiful organ music. Evocative. Soaring. Not a church organ but an Art Deco theatre organ. I could tell it was ‘live’ and not a recording by the timbre oozing through the buildings’ pores and massaging its sinews. Dad would have loved it. I welled up. Pulling myself together, I finished stacking the b...

Apparently, (code for ‘I read it in the Daily Mail ’) Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is suing someone I’ve never heard of called Brian Molko, lead ‘singer’ (I use that term advisedly) with a band I’m equally clueless about called Placebo. His crime was referring in a public forum to Meloni as a “piece of s**t, fascist and racist”. He spoke in Italian so it probably sounded sexy. According to the Mail , under Italy's criminal code anyone who 'publicly defames the Republic' including the government, parliament, the courts and the army, could face a fine of up to €5,000 (£4,300). Sounds to me like a slam dunk and I’m rooting for her. Given that Meloni leads a party with neo-fascist roots and is considered to be an heir to Benito Mussolini, taking her side is rather dangerous, n’est-ce pas? Or should that be, non è questo? Hey. I frequently blog my admiration for Boris Johnson, profess the hots for Jacob Rees-Mogg, have a picture of Suella Braverman on my wall, am return...

The rush to redesign communities as ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhoods’, and the recent pronouncements by Fishy Rishi against them, illustrates much of what is wrong with policymaking in Britain today. LTNs are residential areas that are re-purposed for residents and non-motorised forms of transport by installing some sort of roadblock at the entrances, huge planters are favoured, and maybe traffic calming. Automatic number-plate recognition cameras for enforcement can also be installed. Many LTNs were introduced from 2020, funded by tens of millions of pounds of government money given to local councils. Their intended outcomes are laudable: improve air quality, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and noise pollution, reduce accidents, encourage walking and cycling and reduce street crime, including muggings and sexual assaults. What's not to like?

It can’t have escaped your notice that there’s no such thing as an accident or bad luck any more. Someone else is always to blame. Everyone is responsible except the ‘victim’. They just want the right to be compensated, even by themselves through their own taxes. Daft, eh? 

I’ve gone on record saying that, post Boris, I have no one to vote for. Sunak is a lying, back-stabbing, out-of-touch, closet rejoiner, and while some of the alternative right-of-centre parties look good at first blush, some of their off-the-cuff pronouncements raise my eyebrows, and some of their supporters raise my hackles. So I have been politically homeless, but that might be about to change.

Kate Middleton impersonating a blade of grass at Wimbledon last week put me off watching the tennis finals. I’m not too struck on champion Vondrousova’s tattoos either. It’s not as if they’re brilliantly executed – she looks like she’s stumbled through a disintegrating ink-smothered spider’s web.  A proper witch who annoyed me this week was Carol Vorderman; she took a cheap Twitter-shot at Johnny Mercer MP (Con) and his wife Felicity (more about her later) for not having university degrees. Did I say cheap? I mean tawdry. 

Here we go again. The food police, in the guise of insufferable sanctimonious pseudo-celebrity and 15-minute-meal-fraudster Jamie Oliver, and war criminal Tony Blair, are headlined in the Times , pushing for salt and sugar (S&S) taxes to solve the health crisis. The obvious objection to the proposals is that they come from two egomaniacs with no democratic mandate or sufficient knowledge about diet and economics. Oliver is only a celebrity chef, and a failed restauranteur, not a busy housewife, dietician or economist. Blair’s just Blah. Oliver’s recipes rely on too many ingredients, most not that popular with many UK households, and too many steps. I’m a wham-bam-thank-you-man kinda cook. And delicious with it: the meals that is, not me. Oliver’s never going to get people to cook from scratch if they’ve got to get used to lots of unfamiliar ingredients. 

With apologies to Robert Burns. It seemed like a simple-enough plan: drive to a South Yorkshire Premier Inn on Wednesday afternoon, drive Sis early Thursday morning to hospital for a major procedure and week-long stay, drive back to her flat, do some cleaning, tidying and pack some things for her eight-week convalescence with us, post a letter through all her neighbours’ doors saying someone had better take over the management company or Project Fear would kick in. Yes I realise that the majority of Northerners didn’t fall for the Remoaner Project Fear claptrap, but I know what buttons to press in the North. While waiting for my phone to jump out of my back pocket with multiple volunteers (ever the optimist), I’d find all the relevant paperwork in Sis’s flat in readiness for the handover. What could possibly go wrong?

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.