403. Brexit is Britain’s self-harm but the climate crisis cannot be mitigated by going begging with pre-Christmas visas…

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”

George Santayana (Spanish American philosopher)

With COP 26 in mind, half -heartedly led by Boris de-Kermit Johnson who is on record as a climate change denier and, it seems, has never really believed in anything in his life – perhaps we could update that truism. Here is a suggestion…

Those who refuse to see the obvious future are condemned to have none.

Oh – and – talking of obvious futures and predictable catastrophes – here is a little post of mine from 2016 as we face certain fowl coming home (or not) to roost – see last week’s post and this one from the archives - Brexit Broke Britain

As this government, with no sense of shame or irony, goes cap-in-hand to foreign lorry drivers and farm workers and vets, we really should tie these two things together and remind ourselves that while Brexit is a national catastrophe for everyone but a handful of the rich, insulated (!) by their wealth from the obvious outcomes of their selfishness, bigotry and cruelty – climate catastrophe is something even they cannot outrun in the end…

Do check out Zero One Zero Two (dystopian novella paperback / e-book)*

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 Casey & the Surfmen (environmental story read in poetry audio/paperback/e-book)

AND – something different this week

I was part of the Brum Radio Poetry programme which aired on Sunday morning. Hosted by the talented Rick Sanders it's 3 poets (including yours truly) doing poetry and some chat about personal and writing life. It was lots of fun to do Brum Radio Poetry * Includes a reading from Zero One Zero Two

AND – I’ll be performing at the Leamington Poetry festival @ The Temperance in Leamington Saturday 23^rd October 7.30. More info later.

402. Turkeys (if not chickens) come home to roost – but not to roast…

During the EU referendum many on the Leave side said they felt patronised being referred to as ‘Turkey’s voting for Christmas’. But surely we’ve never had a better example of actual turkeys having the last laugh because the metaphorical turkeys who voted for their own demise may not now get the plump fat stupid bird (no – not Boris Johnson) as ‘supply chain problems’ (that would be Brexit to you and me) mean that there is not enough CO2 to get the birds killed in time and there is a lorry driver shortage for all the usual commercial shit that passes for Christmas in consumer mad Britain.

As a Christian, environmentalist and a vegetarian, Brexit finally makes me laugh…

…hysterically!

As John Lewis announce with great fanfare they’ve saved Christmas by luring lorry drivers to work for them and their new commercial cabal – a general cry of relief goes up. The Christmas shit will get here. Hooray.

And if you like your irony mixed with madness and some WTF on the side – how about the not-an-energy crisis the government is blabbering about. Even if enough CO2 is found (and let’s face it there is plenty in the atmosphere wrecking the planet – could we not get some of that?) there might be no gas or electricity to cook the things anyhow. The turkeys if not the chickens are coming home to roost though maybe not to roast…

But those lorry drivers weren’t plucked from under a bush with their John Lewis £1000 golden hellos. They have been pulled from other hard pressed areas that might be delivering things a bit more important than your sparkly table runner and the expensive tat that goes under the tree dying in the corner. I would say its dying in an ever over-heated home but Kwasi (I cannot help but think – Quasi) Kwarteng – business secretary has assured the UK public that the energy crisis will be handled by the government. So that’s ok then. When has anyone in Johnson’s government – or Johnson himself – ever lied to Britain or allowed their incompetence to entirely 100% foul things up?

KK has promised in his best faux Boris doing bad faux Churchill that “the lights will not go out”. For myself – the electricity in my street has been going off intermittently in the early hours of the morning for many months now. NO ONE HAS EPLAINED WHY. It could, of course, just be that a lot of UK infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose since privatisation.

The shortages on our shelves are linked to lack of lorry drivers and that is to do with Brexit not covid.

People dying because they waited – in one case – 40 hours for an ambulance, as the once untouchable NHS slips from 1^st to 4^th place in the world (and sinking) after being hammered by Tory austerity and the effects of – yes covid but also Brexit.

The limp, lame, pathetic, government-enthralled media need to cowboy-up and start calling this what it is and they are going to have to shout loud to be heard above the celebrity shriek of Strictly Come Brain Death, I’m No Longer A Celebrity Which Is Why I’m Here and The Great British Back-hander which is UK TV.

Are folk going to start paying attention when it’s finally time to send the increasing number of poor children back up chimneys? Will the great British public eventually snap out of it when there is a workhouse in every town and the ‘deserving poor’ line up for gruel on a Monday morning?

Will Joe Normal and Mrs Ordinary finally stop literally shopping for England when the last bird has fallen out of the sky? The Independent (a scenario drawn in my audio story Casey & the Surfmen) 

It is all linked. Little England did this, like delinquent 12 year olds that got locked in the school over the weekend with access to matches and kerosene…

We can all smell the smoke, hear the alarms; our eyes are stinging and it’s getting hard to breathe or see through the black sooty smoke but the UK media is still behaving like it’s just the toast burning. And falsely smelling burning toast is such an appropriate sign of senility where the press are concerned.  As for the government – well…

 

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Usually I suggest you check out my books – because I think you’d like some of them but also it makes me happy when I get sales despite not having a mainstream publisher. This week I’m just going to recommend Zero One Zero Two or where we are definitely going from here.

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And - not to overload you with links this week but there is a reading from Zero One Zero Two on Brum Radio's Poetry programme which will air this Sunday 26th Sept at 10am. Brum Radio Poets

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And - finally - i'll be doing the Comedy poetry night at the Leamington Poetry fest in Oct. Details to follow.

401. Britain in 3 doodles!

More relevant than ever - three doodles from previous blog posts...

...becasue you know I'm sometimes lost for words.

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Do check out My BOOKS thank you.

400. From White Van Man to Square Grey Sofa People - explaining public inertia in the face of the UK’s degradation at the hands of Boris Johnson...

 

Square grey sofas show us why so few folk are raging against this catastrophic government, the lies of Brexit and the rotting pile of consequences we can no longer pretend are to do with covid.

It was Emily Thornberry who stepped down from Labour’s front bench under Ed Miliband after tweeting a picture of a house with a white van and two St George’s flags hung outside. She should have learned from Gordon Brown that we now live in a country where you can be a xenophobic bigot but you cannot intimate that someone may be bigoted or xenophobic. In Thornberry’s case – it was not just the white van it was the juxtaposition with the two English flags. And – for what it’s worth – I make the same assumptions she made when I see anyone hanging national flags on their houses.

But that is past history. In fact – judging from the content of much of the media these days – what happens at breakfast is history by teatime. What happened last week or was said by a government minister two days ago is ancient dusty – barely remembered antiquity – never to be contradicted even if the same folk are saying something entirely at odds with what they said or promised in their last interview.

A few days ago I was perusing Gumtree while my partner did the same on Fb, searching for a cheap sofa. What we saw was item after item ad infinitum (!) of square grey sofa. Punctuated by the occasional more colourful settee, obviously from an older household.

Odd – I thought – in a country where all advertising and marketing seems aimed at targeting a person’s individuality. ‘It’s all about you’ says the sexy, whispery voice or the humorous laddish tone – whether its interiors or cars or new kitchens. And somehow – everyone ends up with much the same. And they are bored with it before it’s been paid for.

I then went down a thought alley which meandered around how people also sound the same. Whichever part of the country you happen to be in – people talk in Soap Opera / morning TV / cheap drama soundbites. Everyone is ‘going on a journey’ ‘struggling with my mental health’ (no one is ever just having a bad day anymore). The comedy clichés have worked their way in ‘did you see what I did there?’ after any mundanity. No one seems to be themselves.

I began to get the uncomfortable feeling that the whole of Britain had become a sluggish, less shiny Stepford. Thinking for yourself is dangerous.

Then the alley got dark and thorny. Is this why no one seems to think independently – no one seems to critically evaluate what they read or hear or what is fed to them on their one-line news feeds? Is this why the media seems so lame – just a vehicle for government press releases and staged photos? Is this why the level of anger at the way the poor / disadvantaged / immigrant population are treated is less than tepid. Is this why – unlike me – the vast majority of folk do not seem to be pissing themselves that fairly soon there will be real food shortages and infrastructure breakdowns in even wealthy countries? (Starting with the wealthy country that voted Brexit)

The grey sofa people…

Not stupid just worn out – like their sofas. Not unkind – just flattened by life - like their sofas. Not liking the current situation – just unable to get up – off their square grey sofas.

And – yes – you may argue that the fact that so many square grey sofas are being sold is a sign that the SGS People are coming  out of their stupor – their malaise – their do-what-everyone-else-is-doing or die mentality. But no. If they have all got over Square Grey Sofaitis – it’s only because the next version is due – like the next smart phone or the next shade of eye shadow or the next hairstyle that EVERYONE will have to make themselves feel individual… Maybe this time it will be blue – nothing too startlingly different. Just enough to make the SGS People buy into the next thing that everyone else has that makes them feel a. they are individual and b. like everyone else…

And this mind balancing act takes up time, energy and money so who can worry about global warming or your kids breathing poison air or killer amounts of sugar and fat in food or that fact that the country is run by a dumb arsed, self-obsessed shyster and a circus of cretins whose only instinct is to cream off more wealth for their own tribe?

It’s really a perfect solution to the problem of people not being happy with an unfair world.  It’s a simple solution for a species that – in its natural state - questions and looks with a critical eye at the world around. A final solution. To all our problems.

It’s Stepford Britain populated with the Square, Grey Sofa People fed with the fat and sugar of media candy and talked into a blank torpor by the endless ramblings of their crazy-clown overlord.

No rebellion necessary.

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Should have another comedy gig coming up in October. I'll post details when its confirmed.

Meanwhile - do check out My BOOKS all available on expanded distribution so you can buy from alternative, independent online bookstores. And remember while I'm not on Fb/twit/tik/inst etc etc - there are corresponding youtube videos for ALL the poems in  Fun Poems for Children performed by ME.