Israel and Palestine – the skinny

I went to the Cambridge Footlights Review, in 1981 I think, which starred students who went by the names of Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. Slattery performed the most wonderful sketch – all Star Wars episodes in 90 seconds. I laughed so much I felt nauseous! On a similar level of ridiculousness, I now try to summarise my take on the Israel-Palestine conflict in about 1300 words. 

What day is it?

It’s fashionable these days to have a special day / week / month for, well, anything really. My LinkedIn feed is filled every day, all day, with a different notification of a day / week / month celebrating every sort of person, cause, thing under the sun.

International Women’s Day (March 8th) takes the shine off Mother’s Day (March 14th this year), but I can’t be arsed with either as March 4th is my Aunt’s birthday and March 8th is my Mum’s. On top of this there’s LGBTQ+XYZ History Month in February and Black History Month in October. 

When are we going to have a Straight White Male Month please?

Racism is dead. Long live discrimination

The morning after my second Covid vaccine, I was feeling rather groggy. Not ill or flu-y but yawny and lacklustre. Not up to doing much else, I spent longer than normal eating my toast and Marmite (Help! Marmite is in short supply and I only have half-a-jar left) catching up with my LinkedIn feed, and marvelling at how many hits my blog has had this month. (It was the ‘Bodies Piling High’ post wot did it).

I was reading the kinds of articles I don’t normally bother with, such as the best UK beaches according to Which? as reported by Daily Mail Online. Bamburgh (Northumberland) was top – I wonder if the vote was taken in summer, or winter when Siberian gales blast over the North Sea. Near the bottom of the list was Weston-super-Mare (Somerset). I was disappointed with that placing because I have a soft spot for Weston. We went there a couple of times as kids, and it’s where my grandmother died suddenly in 1943 aged just 37 so of course I never knew her, but it’s still sad.

Let the bodies pile high - pure poetry

Bo Jo said, apparently, “Let the bodies pile high,” when initially refusing to lockdown the economy, again, in response to the second Covid spike.

All hell has broken loose. He’s been criticised, chastised and condemned: branded as cruel, callous and criminal. 

But not by me.

Two funerals and a wedding

When Princess Beatrice married her dashing Edoardo last summer, the contrast with the previous showy, lavish, crowd-filled, OTT affairs of sister Eugenie and, before that, cousin Harry was marked but necessary.

The country was in Covid-crisis. Minimal social gatherings were the law. The Royal Family were (are) not above the law. Bea and Ed accepted their selfless roles in wider society and didn’t pull rank. They did their duty by respecting the law and showing solidarity with those who have no rank to pull. To drive the message home, Bea symbolically wore a second-hand frock. (Yeah I know it was still one helluva frock.)  In other words, the British Royal Family showed leadership and grace.

Lived Experience or Lie

You know where this came from: ‘Lived Experience’ = ‘Your Truth’ in Oprah-speak, and that many – TOO many – people believe Ms Markle’s phantasmagorical claims. Those of us who raise an eyebrow and point to hard facts to counter her claims are denigrated. Lying, apparently, is acceptable if you believe or claim you believe what you saw / heard / interpreted / experienced was true, especially if you are anything other than white, middle-class and male.

Mixed messages don't excuse murder

About two weeks ago a young woman, Sarah Everard, was reportedly kidnapped while walking home in London by a serving police officer and then murdered.

Who am I talking about?

1. Paranoid. Delusional. Malicious. Meghan Markle? Nope. The European Union.

2. Hypocritical. Truculent. Traitorous. Duke of Sussex? Nah. Roy Greenslade.

The Ox-Cam ARC Love-in

Yesterday the Government published its “Planning for sustainable growth in the Oxford-Cambridge Arc An introduction to the Oxford-Cambridge Arc Spatial Framework”. Trips off the tongue, dunt it.

I sat through an hour-long webinar ‘launch’ of said document today, hosted by property consultants Bidwells, who are making and will make a mint out of downing trees, digging up pasture and throwing concrete around like confetti, which is what the ARC is all about. They say not. They say it’s about beautiful, sustainable development in the “knowledge-based” economy that will make the ARC a great place to live. The fact that it’s already a great place to live because it’s green and rural and tranquil in many places seems to have escaped their notice.

HS2 – a catalyst for crass

I got into a spat on LinkedIn recently, with several people who couldn’t fathom why anyone could be against HS2 and who objected to an interloper (me) invading their pro-HS2 feed with a short and polite reminder that no, the HS2-objectors will not come to love the scheme.

Anyone would have thought I’d said I was delighted England had lost to Scotland at the weekend. But I suppose if I were doing a job I loved, which paid the mortgage, with mates I liked and had been brainwashed into believing I was doing the country if not the planet a favour, I’d be miffed when someone crashed the party. 

Cultural Appropriation? Bring it on!

There are very few pieces of music that can top the sublime 2^nd movement of the New World Symphony by Czech composer Dvořák. You know the one – it accompanies an early 20^th-century lad delivering Hovis loaves up one of the steepest residential streets in England (Dorset) but the music is played by the Ashington Colliery Brass Band (Northumberland) and the voice-over is pure Yorkshire.

Yes the music is heavenly; the street-scene transports you back to the civilised days before cheap flights, sweat pants and ‘Influencers’, and the old man reminds you of your grandfather, whatever accent he had.

I'm proud of my Scottish heritage, but ...

A few blogs ago I wrote about women leaders and listed a few “turkeys – either incompetent or dangerous.” I missed one out. How, I really don’t know because she’s the biggest turkey of the lot.

Scotland’s First Minster, Nicola Sturgeon.

So much for being principled

I was chuffed to bits last week when my best friend’s teenage daughter signed up to LinkedIn and invited me to connect, her first invitee outside her immediate family.

She’s a grand lass, as we say up north. I’ve known her all her life and she’s kind of a Godchild. Only kind of, not a proper one, because of me and my stupid principles.

2020 ended on a high

Firstly for Hubby, who exchanged his too-small gilet for one that fitted nicely, thus meaning I officially bought him a successful Xmas pressie (see previous blogpost).

And also for me, who had a letter published in The Times on New Years Eve. Always an ego-boost!

The muse this time was Brexit – no surprise there then – in response to the slew of Remoaner letters in The Times on the 30th. I know “Remonaner” is an insulting term and that we Brexiteers should be magnanimous in victory, but these letters were undeserving of anyone’s magnanimity, which is a polite way of saying they were pathetic.

Not sure about Hubby’s Xmas

In the greater scheme of things, and compared to many other people’s Xmases this year, I think Hubby’s was ok. Mind you, I haven’t asked him what he thinks about it yet; if I did, him being an accountant and all, he’d probably list the goods and the bads in two adjacent columns and dwell on how much longer the bad column was.

Pre-empting that, here are the bads that I can think of:

Women!

One of my friends said in exasperation the other day, “Wouldn’t the world be a better place if it were run exclusively by women!” 

Errr, no.

The not-so-mad Mad Hatter and friends

Recently I had cause to revisit Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Immediately I asked myself, why on earth don’t I revisit Lewis Carrol more often? What fun. So pertinent!

Here’s an excerpt from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party that just about sums up today’s shenanigans, be they double-speak from politicians, not-so-subtle messages from the Sussexes, or weasel words in planning applications:

“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.

Talking about food, or maybe not

Probably a bit crass to blog about food right after I’ve blogged about hungry children, but I’ve had one of those weeks when everything else has gone wrong so why not my sensitivity and PR nous?

But before the food, the week.

Still feeling a bit crabby for firing off a, er, crabby email when I shouldn’t have done (another story), I was faced early Thursday morning with receipt of an (unrelated) email that made me think that if I didn’t resign from this particular organisation tout de suite (I should really say sofort as I’m learning German at the mo, not French) I’d be party to being negligent and reckless. Let me give you a hint: if a safety organisation said Do This, would you Do That instead, because it was much much cheaper? Course you wouldn’t, but this lot did and I wasn’t consulted first, so off went the resignation e-mail before I’d had my second strong coffee.

Want to feed children?

Had another letter published in the Bucks Herald this week:

Want to feed children? Local is the best way

I support our local MPs, Greg Smith and Rob Butler, for voting against the proposed food vouchers during the school holidays. 

Earlier this year, provision of such vouchers was far from universally successful, being slow to deliver, expensive to administer, and target recipients were missed more often than an English soccer penalty. As a more viable alternative, in many communities local foodbanks instantaneously materialised, and established foodbanks stepped up a notch. The result was that more kids were fed more quickly locally than nationally.

Cousin Johnny – lest we forget after 80 years

We sat down this morning in Mum’s sitting room to watch on TV the Remembrance Day service at the Cenotaph in Whitehall.

Just as it started she asked, “Where are my uncles?”

I went into the dining room and opened the display cabinet where a picture of her four uncles, who had served in WWI, had pride of place. I removed the photo and took it over to her, where she held it on her lap throughout the programme, occasionally stroking it.