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Tuesday 7 July 2020

353 No poetry in the park – but you can get pissed in public.

And it actually makes sense (bear with me.)

Disappointed as I was that the Leamington Poetry Festival, where I was due to perform this July, was cancelled, clearly I understood why.

As I mentioned on several comment sites over the weekend - when Cummings’ boris-bot started banging his trumpy fists and sputtering about ye olde British pub opening on Saturday 4th July, I was initially bemused. THEN I saw that fascist farage had returned from his sojourn to his US white-supremacist buddy to partake ‘ordinary bloke’ style of some manly pints and the penny dropped. It was a while before I recognised the sound as it’s been so long since those of us in the arts have had proper income.

But stop and think about it for a nanosecond and it all fits.

We are now past the date when a Brexit trade negotiation extension could have been secured. Under cover of covid, common sense was throttled. If the pandemic did not start in China one would have to assume Cummings planned it.

We are heading to economic and credibility annihilation at a time in world history when all that stands between countries that succeed and those that will fail – is co-operation – trade, economics, science, communications, security etc. As the rest of the EU are pulling out of the covid mess, Britain is heading to all the glories of chlorinated chicken and reduced environmental protections and the decimation of rights for low-paid workers – in other words – a no deal Brexit. And that was Cumming’s plan and Farage’s aim all along. I will not entertain the ridiculous idea that Johnson had any plan at all...

So it makes absolute sense that while in my home town of Leamington, punters cannot sit in one of the wonderful open parks and listen to poetry – you can go and get publicly pissed because it was, after all, July 4th; Independence Day. And we are about to become a miserable 3rd rate half-state of a country on the other side of the Atlantic while we reject the continent across the channel…

Cheers.