How to Play with Planning a Novel

It’s the summer solstice today – to be accurate, at 9.50 last night: at that point OH and I looked out of the window and then at each other in a very anticlimactic way as not much was happening. I don’t know what we expected – but last night as I went to bed I saw the moon rising and gasped; it was orange from the dying sun and nearly full. I watched it for a few moments as it rose above the trees. It reminded me of one night when I was walking across Victoria Park in Leicester. It’s a large, open park and at one end of it was the rising moon. It was opposite the sun and blood-red in a dark sky; it looked weird and magical. Every year I think I’ll go to Beacon Hill for the solstice celebration and every year I sleep through it. This year I had no such excuse; I was awake at 3.30 but it didn’t even occur to me, alas. I tried to get back to sleep but was plagued by anxiety so at 6 I gave up the unequal struggle, meditated for a bit and then made myself a drink. The day did not start out very promising; I felt very pent-up and frustrated but then I decided to do yoga in the garden. The grass is very long at the moment but I lay my mat down on top of it and stretched among the grasses and wild flowers and felt much better. I had breakfast outside too.

Last night I began what may turn into another novel. I have terrible trouble with the novel form; I can’t decide whether to plan or just begin writing and as soon as I start thinking about what to write all my ideas flee away and I’m looking at a total blank in my mind as well as a blank page. Then I had an idea: my father-in-law used to work for a paper-mill in Chartham, Kent (Wiggins Teape):

https://charthampapers.altervista.org/?page_id=3231

and he left a box of paper samples which we’ve kept. Some of these were what I thought was graph paper but they turned out to be graph data pads with tiny squares of different sizes for plotting logarithms. This is interesting in itself – much more so than a pad of even squares – and that started me off. My plan had been to decide on the themes of the novel and give each one a colour; then plot these on the graph to give a representation of structure. But I couldn’t begin. This is always my problem; if I plan I get bored; if I don’t, I get stuck. But then I had a brainwave: turn the whole thing round! Do the colours first and then decide what they represent. Or not; most writers, most of the time, work on instinct; what feels right or looks right or sounds right. It’s not till afterwards that you understand why. So for a while I played around with colours and made different shapes and lines on the pad. I have no idea what they represent but I am sure that this is the right approach. Sometimes we creative types get so hung up in the process that we forget to play.

Happy Friday. Enjoy your day, whatever you’re doing.

Kirk out

The Fast Show?

One of the things I’ve been trying to get off the ground for ages is a practice of fasting. I can do a fruit fast for a day or two; that’s no problem, but doing without food altogether is on another level altogether. After a while I start to feel faint; my blood sugar plummets and I get a headache – and besides, meals break up my day. When you work alone at home you need things to punctuate the hours and give you a reason for a break. So up to now any attempt to fast has always failed at the first hurdle. But last week I thought it might be a nice tribute to Michael Mosley to fast for a day or two. Michael Mosley advocated the 2/5 diet (or was it 2/7?) suggesting people fast for two days a week in order to lose weight. Apparently it was the 5/2 diet – and he wasn’t so much advocating fasting as restricting calories. But anyway…

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/the-5-2-diet-guide#:~:text=The%205%3A2%20diet%2C%20also,to%20500%E2%80%93600%20per%20day.

Of course traditionally people have fasted for religious reasons; I am in awe of practising Muslims who observe the Ramadan fast as this can entail going without food and drink for long hours. This year the sun rose around 4.30 and set around 6.30 so that’s a 14-hour fast; a long time to go without liquids, never mind food. Plus Ramadan skips around so the day could be even longer. I suppose it helps if you’re doing it in a group and as part of an established practice but even so it must take a lot of self-discipline.

Yesterday after lunch I felt my system really needed a clear-out so instead of just skipping dinner I thought I’d try a 24-hour fast; 1 pm yesterday to 1 pm today. Missing dinner was OK as I wasn’t hungry; I just worked right through. But gradually over the course of the evening hunger stole over me and eventually at 8.30 I cracked and had some fruit and yoghurt. Still, it’s progress – and today I shall aim to fast until 1 pm anyway. It’s all a matter of getting over the hump and developing a practice. It’s the same with everything, whether it’s water-skiing or playing the piano. You have to develop a practice. Fasting is hard because your body keeps nudging you every few minutes saying I want something, I want something , I want something now! and you have to keep saying, wait. You have to train it. Anyway I’ll let you know how I get on. But lots of people have said the experience of fasting is very beneficial; it leads to mental clarity and better digestion. So we’ll see. The proof of the pudding is in the – erm –

It’s the solstice today and once again I have failed to get up and go to Beacon Hill at sunrise for the solstice celebration. One of these years I’ll make it – except that we won’t be here next year so I’ll have to find somewhere in Dumfries and Galloway.

We still haven’t had the drains report. I’ll have to chase them up or it’ll be money down the –

Kirk out

Replacing One’s Trap

Slowly the house move grinds on. It’s enough to make you wish you were a Native American and could just strike camp and move; or a member of the travelling community, though that doesn’t appeal quite so much as many of them seem quite patriarchal; as one traveller woman said of another tribe, they get married at sixteen and spend the rest of their lives cleaning the caravan. Not appealing. But packing up a 4-bedroom house and moving all the stuff to Scotland (not to mention getting rid of endless stuff acquired from deceased parents in law and a son in America) is a ridiculous burden. Why do we have so much stuff? It’s insane. I’ve been freecycling and trying to sell things left right and centre but there always seems to be more of it. Anyway, the next phase in the grinding saga has been reached; we have accepted an offer on the house. This is more in the spirit of not wanting things to drag on than being delighted with the offer as it’s less than we were hoping for, but it’s a bird in the hand and he does seem keen. He’s going to have a full survey done though so we live in trepidation of what horrors that might uncover.

Racism against travellers is just about the last acceptable prejudice. Mind you, there seems to be a lot of unacceptable prejudice still going on with Nigel Farage dog-whistling all the time and various politicians (mostly on the right) having to apologise or resign for offensive comments. On the left, Diane Abbot was recently investigated for saying that travellers and Jewish people do not experience racism but prejudice. I think this was an unhelpful and divisive thing to say; a bit like saying ‘my racism is worse than your racism’ instead of promoting solidarity with all marginalised groups (I’m starting to sound like a socialist ranter here. I shall take a deep breath.) Mind you, I think Abbot was punished far more than others, particularly Tories and those on the far right, who have said much worse things.

Anyway, we live to fight another day. Next on the agenda is getting the interceptor trap replaced.

Kirk out

Freud’s Last Session

I hadn’t heard of this film until I saw it advertised in the Phoenix brochure, but when I saw the subject matter and that it starred Anthony Hopkins, I was sold. Freud’s Last Session is in the best traditions of quiet storytelling; there were no hand-held cameras, nothing was sensationalised or ‘modernised’ – except that the story of Anna Freud, his daughter, figured much more prominently than it might have in another age. It was one of those unhurried films that unfolds without whizzes and bangs but nevertheless interests all the way through. Set in London at the very start of the war, Freud’s Last Session tells the story of an imagined encounter between Freud, then aged 83 and dying of mouth cancer, and the young CS Lewis. The war has only just begun so London is in the grip of the phoney war, everyone from rushing to the nearest air raid shelter when the alarm goes only to find that it’s a false alarm. Lewis has what we would now call a panic attack, triggering a flashback to his experiences in the trenches. Freud calms him and in spite of their clashing ideologies the two men arrive at some sort of understanding; Freud comprehending Lewis’s fears better than he does himself, and Lewis gently ribbing Freud for being an unbeliever whose desk is guarded by statues of gods and goddesses.

The film would not be so interesting were it not for the sub-plot of Anna Freud. She is clearly suffering from what her father would have called an Electra complex, unable to free herself from his selfish demands, neglecting her lectures at the college to run from chemist to chemist trying to get the medicine he has asked for (and then forgotten.) This subplot does end with a kind of resolution. Anna has been in a relationship with a woman at college and brings her home to meet her father. It’s a very understated encounter; there’s no dialogue, no introductions, no demands; they simply sit holding hands and eventually he gives an understanding nod. End of story. Three days later Freud takes his own life in a planned euthanasia.

It’s an interesting twist to have Hopkins play Freud, as he so famously played Lewis in the 1993 Shadowlands. One aspect of Lewis’s life which wasn’t explored there was his mysterious relationship with his dead fellow-officer’s mother, Mrs Moore; a relationship which may or may not have been sexual but in which she was clearly a substitute for Lewis’s dead mother while he stood in for her son.

Some reviewers have said that Freud’s Last Session is lacking in passion; I don’t disagree but it’s worth watching for all that.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt20420628/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_Freud%27s

Kirk out

Maybe it’s the Time of Year

This is usually a good time of year for me. Our wedding anniversary and my birthday are three days apart so this is usually a time of extended bacchanalia with meals out and bottles of wine and pilgrimages to places associated with our wedding. On Saturday we sallied forth early-ish to be out of the way of the estate agent showing someone round, and caught the bus to Leicester. The weather wasn’t great but we got another bus up London road and walked down to our favourite cafe, Fingerprints Delicafe on Queen’s Rd. This has a lot of history for us as we used to go there for breakfast every Friday; sadly they don’t do the samosas with sauce and crumpets with jam which were our staple food, but we were ready for something more substantial anyway and had the full veggie/vegan breakfast. Then we went to see Our Tree. When we got married we were given a flowering cherry sapling. This was a lovely present but not terribly practical as we didn’t have a garden to put it in; so as we’d got married in the Friends’ Meeting House we offered it to them. Sadly they didn’t have space in their garden so it ended up being put in the car park. We should have got a plaque to put on it but we didn’t, so in the end we weren’t sure which of two trees was ours and did obeisance to both.

Across the park and down the famous New Walk stands the New Walk Museum, an imposing colonnaded building housing some excellent exhibitions; we were never out of there when the children were growing up. And thanks to the National Gallery they’ve been loaned a Renoir – Les Parapluies. They’ve put it in a room of its own with a mini-exhibition about it including a short, family-friendly animation. The painting just catches Renoir in the middle of changing styles and if you look from right to left you can see him switching from impressionism to a more representational style; the central figure gazing out of the canvas (a hatter, it turns out) being representational while the figures on the right, including a child, are more impressionistic.

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/pierre-auguste-renoir-the-umbrellas

There’s a lot going on in the painting; people caught in the act of walking to and fro, one person closing an umbrella, another lifting theirs up over the heads of the crowd. I much prefer this sort of painting to a posed picture, especially the sort of art John Berger criticises as being a statement of ‘look-what-I’ve-got’. Could be a stately home, a wife, a mistress, a cow – the statement is the same.

https://www.ways-of-seeing.com/

After that we were terribly clever. A storm had been forecast, of which I was unaware, and we managed to time our walk exactly with the storm breaking. I’d just taken a phone call saying we’d had an offer on the house so I was feeling quite cheerful, but just as we got back into town the storm broke. I ducked into a doorway to put on my waterproof trousers while OH stuck with a trusty umbrella but it didn’t stop our feet and hands and shoes and socks and bags and everything in the bags getting soaked. It was Biblical. The streets were rivers, and to add to our misery we got lost. I always get lost going to the Phoenix – all the streets look the same round there and I couldn’t get my phone out to use the satnav or that would’ve been soaked as well. Thunderclaps followed on the heels of lightning bolts. There was nowhere to shelter. To add to our woes all the buildings were wrapped in scaffolding and plastic so we couldn’t even see the Phoenix when we found it – but we did eventually get in the dry to see our film, Freud’s Last Session, which I shall review in another post.

We came out of the cinema two hours later to completely dry streets, as though the city were trying to gaslight us (storm? There was never any storm!) There was an attempt at having a couple of beers in the Ale Wagon but we were so wet we decided to get the next bus home. Having dried and changed I did venture out again for half an hour to see Steve Cartwright play at the Moonface and thence to the chippy for some delicious chips, deep fried haloumi and curry sauce which we ate while watching Dr Who. All in all an excellent birthday.

Kirk out

A Plague of Optical Mice

To my intense relief I managed to track down my old laptop yesterday. I wasn’t very impressed with the shop; they didn’t give me a receipt (I vaguely thought I should ask for one but I was distracted) they said they’d give me a ring and didn’t, and it was clear when I got there that they hadn’t even looked at it. So I took it away again and a different shop will get my custom. There are three shops on the same street in Loughborough, all offering the same services, and I had to trawl them all before I found it. Anyway it’s back home and will be sorted when I have the money. Today a friend of ours is filling in some holes in the downstairs bedroom (the estate agent told us not to bother but people have said the house needs too much work so we thought it would help.) We’re having the drains looked at tomorrow to check for any subsidence and we have reduced the price slightly so we’re hopeful of moving things on.

So with the laptop still not sorted I’m back on the old chrome book and slowly getting to grips with google docs. It’s like a foreign country; they do things differently there. Otherwise things are OK except for my mouse. I have an optical mouse; not just any mouse either but a left-handed one specially moulded for us south-paws and with the buttons reversed. I got it from freecycle – a real find. We understand each other very well, this mouse and me, but for some reason it doesn’t get on with the chrome book. I changed the batteries yesterday but the cursor is still refusing to move until I jiggle the mouse whereupon it jumps about in an arbitrary manner. So I’m having to use the mouse pad which I’m not so keen on.

In other news I actually slept well last night! I decided to banish OH and the Persistent Snore to the spare room and I slept brilliantly; didn’t wake till nearly eight. So I think I’ll hold off on contacting the doc for now. It’s lovely sleeping on your own once in a while; a few nights of this and I’ll be human again instead of half-Dalek and half-Triffid. I always think it’s funny how the word Dalek has penetrated the language without exterminating it; I often wonder whether it’s known in other English-speaking nations. I suspect not; Doctor Who is, as I’ve mentioned before, a peculiarly British phenomenon. Which brings us to the other flaw in the world-view of Nineteen Eighty-Four which I forgot to mention: in the novel English is being reduced word by word and replaced by NewSpeak. But language is not a block to chip away at; language is a river, ever-changing, ever-evolving, where words are lost and new words being added all the time. Which is why organisations like the Academie Francaise which try to ossify la langue, are on such a losing wicket. Just look at this list of English neologisms from last year:

Neologisms 2023 – New Words

… from which I am delighted to see that the Simpsons-invented word ‘cromulent’ which OH and I often use, has made it into the dictionary. Neologisms are not just the province of the educated but are the product of inventive minds; some of the best ones relate to very ordinary things. Mither and gradely are two of my favourite dialect verbs and cockney rhyming slang is brilliantly inventive. Chalfonts is probably my top word there (Chalfont St Giles – piles) though I’m not entirely sure if that was original or made up by the scriptwriters of Minder. Anyway, my point is that language is always evolving and no matter how much the Party may delete words from it, neologisms will always pop up. And in my opinion the Proles are the most likely people to be inventing them.

I’ve lost my thread now. But no matter. Today I am 99% human with shades of Martian and a touch of Cyberman. Tomorrow, 100% human. On Saturday (my birthday) a demigoddess. Onwards and upwards.

Kirk out

Docs and Docs

I finally got through to the doctor this morning after calling 8×4 times and finding it engaged. I don’t often need a doctor’s appointment – most of my visits there are routine check-ups – but sometimes when I’ve tried everything else, needs must. Sleep is the problem, or rather the lack thereof; it’s been going on for weeks now, first the anxiety in the middle of the night connected with moving house and now the light early mornings mean that I don’t get more than five or six hours – and I need eight. Last night it was even worse; I woke at 2.30 and something in my brain said right, that’s it lads – we’re awake now. Didn’t matter what I tried, I just couldn’t get back to sleep – and it wasn’t even daylight at that point. So I decided to consult a higher power and since Jeeves wasn’t available I called the doctor. I have a strategy for calling which means I persist without getting totally fed up; I call eight times and then leave it for a few minutes, then call eight times again. I did get through but of course there were no appointments left. They do have this wonderful system where you can book online via the NHS app; I selected appointments for today: nothing. Tomorrow: nothing. Friday: same story. So I tried the next 7 days – nada. The first available face-to-face appointment was on the 15th July! That’s more than a month! A change of government can’t come soon enough for me – not that I expect they’ll be able to solve the problem but at least they’ll try.

Amazingly I’m not feeling too bad at the moment, it’s just that my brain stalls and I can’t remember what I was going to do next. I’m sure there was something else I was going to write about but I can’t remember what it was. That was it! Google docs. Since my other laptop is in the shop (at least I hope it is; they seem to have mislaid it) I am using the chrome book which is fine in many ways but refuses to download a word processor, forcing me to use Google docs. It’s taking me ages to work out how to use it but I think I’m getting there.

It’s our wedding anniversary today – 31 years manacled together. We’re going to have a special meal at home tonight with some good wine – after which I might just sleep a bit.

Kirk out

The Place Where There is no Darkness

One of the most chilling lines in Nineteen Eighty-Four is O’Brien’s ‘We shall meet again in the place where there is no darkness.’ Julia and Winston interpret this as meaning life after they have destroyed the Party but in fact O’Brien means it quite literally. The place with no darkness is a cell with a blinding light which bores into your skull and is never switched off. And sometimes at 4 am I know how Winston felt, because every day just after sunrise I wake up. It doesn’t matter if it’s sunny or cloudy, the light assaults me like a blow on the head. I have a face mask; last night I even tried putting an eiderdown up over the curtains; it makes no difference. OH reckons it’s to do with the pineal gland and I don’t know what I can do about that but it’s the same every year and I just have to put up with it until I get used to it. Right now I’ve reached that stage of fatigue where I just feel spaced and everything seems unreal.

I’ve often wondered how I would stand up to torture. Very badly, I suspect; I don’t have a high tolerance for pain at all – which made last night’s film all the more horrifying. As it was our last night of Netflix (we periodically cancel it to save money and then start up again) we trawled through to see if there was anything unmissable. We’d already seen the much-trailed series Eric about a boy who goes missing on his way to school; it’s excellent though I didn’t think it was quite as good as the reviews said. But Benedict Cumberbatch was thoroughly compelling as a New York puppeteer who tries to get his son back by making a new puppet in the shape of a monster called Eric and ends up talking to the monster. And the series conveys perfectly well the atmosphere and culture of a 1980’s drama.

Cumberbatch is everywhere right now and he turned up again in the film we eventually decided on: The Mauritanian.

I hadn’t heard of this film but it turned out to be the true story of Mohammedou Slahi, a Mauritanian Muslim arrested on the slenderest of evidence and taken to Guantanamo Bay without charge. There he is put in a cell alone and interrogated for 18 hours a day. His only friend is a man in the exercise yard who he never sees and who he calls Marseilles because that’s where he’s from. Slahi is visited by US lawyer Nancy Hollander played (none too convincingly in my opinion) by Jodie Foster. She doesn’t necessarily believe in his innocence but is concerned that he should get a fair trial and begins a long battle to get hold of the relevant evidence. For the prosecution Stuart Couch, played by Cumberbatch, is your full-on Southern military type desperate to catch the guys responsible for 9/11 particularly because his own brother in law was killed in that attack (to my ear at least Cumberbatch’s deep southern growl is absolutely perfect.) But after many attempts by the authorities to withhold evidence and Crouch’s discovery of Slahi’s story he begins to have doubts.

His superior says at one point, ‘We need to get someone for this.’

‘Someone,’ he replies. ‘Not just anyone.’

When the interrogations fail to produce a confession Slahi is taken to another cell and tortured. The cell is freezing cold; they play loud garage music and flashing lights and there are frequent beatings and waterboardings. It is horrendous. Mo eventually gets his trial and is released but – this is the most shameful part of the story – the Obama government appeals and he is given 7 more years, albeit without waterboarding. Eventually he is freed and publishes his diaries. Again these are heavily redacted but the publishers printed every page, including those blacked out by the censor, which is quite a statement in itself. Guantanamo is one of the most shameful events in modern US history – and it’s still going on. Men are still being held there without trial and without being charged, and in my opinion the biggest failure of Obama’s regime was that he didn’t close it. Here’s the film:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4761112/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

and here, should you choose to watch it, is Eric:

https://shorturl.at/4Fb2lt/4Fb2l

Kinda puts my early mornings into perspective, don’t it?

Kirk out

Orwell or Kafka?

The BBC have gone mad this weekend on the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death. They are pitting Kafka against Orwell and asking which of them has most to say about our current political condition? Of course both of them have different and equally valid things to say and I found the programmes very illuminating; they had a lot to say about Trump and Putin and ‘alternative facts’, Trump’s ‘big lie’ about a ‘stolen’ election which he has gaslit an entire sub-population into believing, and Putin’s narrative about Ukraine being ‘already’ a part of Russia so they are just taking back their own. They say the first casualty of war is truth and I believe it; most ordinary Russians don’t get the news we get about Ukraine but a strained and filtered version about the heroism of Russian troops and the fight to take back stolen land. There’s also an interesting connection between Orwell and Putin in the Salisbury poisoning affair: while O’Brien interrogates Smith in Room 101 (interesting that Orwell has inspired 2 TV programmes and Kafka none) he says that according to the Party, the sun and stars go round the earth. Of course when navigating it may suit us to act as if the stars are millions of miles away, but that is the beauty of doublethink. I’m pretty sure we are all capable of doublethink, and all guilty of it in some way or another. I, for example, am quite capable of believing (as the evidence shows) that climate change is heading towards catastrophe – and yet at the same time in another part of my mind, I believe that my own future and that of my family will be much better than the present. Doublethink.

Also at the weekend they serialised Nineteen Eighty-Four in six instalments, each read by a different actor. I was glued to this and spent four solid hours in my dressing gown listening in increasing horror. Nineteen Eighty-Four never ceases to horrify me because the world is so plausibly complete; a hermetically sealed system that cannot be beaten. In reality of course it has several flaws: in real life ‘proles’ are not uniformly stupid and might easily produce some who would incite others to rebellion. And there is no God or any kind of spiritual life in the novel, something which might have given Smith a strength to resist. Anyway have a listen:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m00201sm

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m00201vh

So why was I in my dressing gown yesterday? you may ask. Well, I was having a much-needed duvet day. And why? Lack of effing sleep, that’s why. It’s the same every year; from mid-May onwards when it starts getting light early, the light wakes me up. We don’t have particularly thin curtains and I do have a face mask, but something about the light just gets into my brain and starts fiddling with the brainwaves and stopping me getting back to sleep. This morning I also had to contend with snoring and needing the loo about 6 am, whereupon OH decided this would be the perfect time to give me some bad news which had just come in (nothing to worry about; it’s all sorted now as I knew it would be.) Infuriating. Despite all this I did eventually sleep for another couple of hours.

Thanks to ongoing fatigue I didn’t do much over the weekend, though I did manage a bit of strimming in the garden and a couple of hours at the Celtic singaround. And that was my weekend.

Kirk out

What is My Stance?

In Scotland a bus stop is known as a ‘bus stance’ which I’ve always found amusing, as though a bus could strike a pose or take up a political position. Scotland is most definitely another country; they do things differently there (as we speak I’m drinking sage tea, a precautionary measure as OH has had a sore throat and cough for a few days. This has not improved the snoring, which has increased to volcanic levels; something horrendous on the Richter scale.) So, should Scotland get independence? What is my stance? On the whole I’m in favour; they are a historic nation and for much of history were separate from England and Wales. They have their own culture, language and practices (two languages actually if you count Scots as well as Gallic – I feel a long rant from OH coming on at this point) and politically the country feels very different from England. If it wasn’t for England we’d have no Tory governments at all; and the way Westminster tends to ignore anything North of Milton Keynes or West of Bath is nothing short of a scandal. Take the HS2 fiasco; if they’d started building it in the North, as they should, it would be a totally different story. But no; everything starts in London, and more often than not it ends there too.

But sadly the independence movement is on the back foot now. Every politician, no matter how good, has an Achilles heel and although I had a lot of respect for Nicola Sturgeon – she was down-to-earth and spoke a lot of sense – she has been brought down by her Achilles’ heel – her husband. At least she did the decent thing and resigned; how many Tories still in government have done similar or worse things? I know corruption isn’t confined to the Conservatives but they do seem to have a particular gift for it.

It’s quite dispiriting that independence should be so much on the back foot. When we first thought of moving to Scotland it looked possible; a long journey, sure, but there seemed to be the political will for it. Mind you, I can see plenty of problems if it did go ahead. There would have to be some sort of border with England which would cause all sorts of difficulties but where there’s a political will there’s usually a way.

As far as the current election goes I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground. I know what the polls say and they do seem fairly incontrovertible (no shy Tories this time around, I think*) but it’s also interesting to hear what people are saying. Someone I bumped into last weekend said they usually voted Tory but wouldn’t this time; and last night I watched some of Question Time to see which way the wind was blowing. Mark Harper, the government bod, did a very poor job of defending Rishi Sunak lying about Labour’s tax plans and the audience clearly weren’t buying it; an attempt to tar Labour with the same brush did not seem to land, although I suppose anyone who already thinks ‘they’re all as bad as each other’ might have their opinion confirmed. I can understand political confusion, I can understand hopelessness and political homelessness, but what really gets to me is indifference; people who say ‘I can’t be bothered voting’ or worse still, just give a shrug. I find this very depressing – if someone is vehemently opposed to you at least they’re involved, but you can’t argue with apathy.

Anyway, I’m ranting a bit. I have to close now as I have a nurse’s appointment for an asthma check-up, but I will just add that yesterday I read Richard E Gran’t memoir A Pocketful of Happiness. This account of his life mostly focuses on the dying and death of his beloved wife Joan from cancer. It’s clear they were devoted to each other and although twee in parts and a bit luvvie in others and suffering from terrible verbs (‘——- friendlied over’) it’s a very touching story. REG comes across as a truly genuine and appreciative guy and even though he has some stories of terrible behaviour he resolutely refuses to name the offenders, though everyone who behaves well is named and thanked. That’s how to write a memoir.

https://www.wob.com/en-gb/books/richard-e-grant/pocketful-of-happiness/9781398519503?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjw34qzBhBmEiwAOUQcFzZSz-wp56iZh6BvrT293uh71vS4r7qV8XlAlo1IVMkxfEPYRpjXoBoCPjQQAvD_BwE#GOR013071001

Kirk out

* this absolutely infuriated me in 1992; the polls were wrong because lots of people not only voted for the *****s but didn’t even have the guts to say they would do so