Wednesday 11^th July

Is it the weather, which never seems to really improve day after day?  Maybe it is the news, the constant battle to prop up the Euro, the daily slanging match in Parliament, but I am just so tired lately.  I wake up tired, and yet I had lain awake in the night, willing sleep on myself to no avail.  It isn’t as if life is particularly hard, it has been much tougher in the past, it just seems that everything is pure repetition.  I am a hamster stuck in a wheel of repetitious tasks which mean nothing and leave me irritated that I am still doing the same things so many years after I had resolved again and again to shed this tired skin and start living again.  And when I look around me, we are all the same, tired worn out faces on the tube, we are all hamsters going round and round on our own little wheels, seeming incapable of either stopping the wheel or our own pathetic scampering.  Is there no other way then?  At times one envies the reckless young, who having nothing to lose go trekking over the world, or just drift from town to town, from job to job, a few carrier bags contain their life story.  But maybe they are just on a different treadmill themselves, who knows.  I just have to get on with it I suppose.  It is called Modern life, and there is almost no escaping it.

Tuesday 10^th July

Not that most people are concerned at all, after all they mostly ignore politicians.  They still blame them, of course, for what goes wrong, which is most of the time, but they cannot be bothered between elections to actually listen to what is being said.  The daily nitty gritty, the cut and thrust of daily politics, is just too boring for them.  Or so they think, it all just passes over their head, or so they will tell you.  But in its insidious way it does seep in.  Dismiss the papers by all means, and most of us don’t read them every day as we used to, but they still matter.  It is also all too easy to avoid the news these days, with hundreds of channels to switch over too, when those dread news drumbeats roll out after your favourite escapist viewing.   But still it gets through and we form impressions of politicians or parties despite our apathy. ‘Labour are in the hands of the unions’   ‘Cameron is a posh boy’  ‘the Liberals cannot be trusted’  etc etc.  But much of what we hear is planted, and most of it to denigrate the opposition; after all it is much easier to criticise the other lot than to say something constructive yourself.   And this is where the lies, the smears and the truly bad politics come in.  It is almost an industry these days, because like advertising, no matter how much you may disagree – it works. And that is why Ed Balls was so angry with George Osborne when he was accused of trying to persuade Barclays to lower it’s Libor submissions.  As if it really matters, but it certainly did to Ed.  Because one of the main deciders of the next election will be for the Tories to portray Labour as untrustworthy, and so far they are doing quite a good job.  They reckon that no matter the state of the economy in their hands the public perception will be that it will be better to stick with us than trust that lot again.  But sometimes those lies and smears can just be bad politics.  If Labour can turn it on its head and show that the Tories are blatant liars they become discredited and the voters will feel that maybe Labour aren’t that bad after all.  It is still three years to the next election, but believe me it has already started.

Monday 9th July

Well, it didn’t go quite to plan, although against Roger Federer, and back to his best again, what plan could have worked.  All you can say is that Andy Murray gave his all, but his all wasn’t quite good enough.  And even at the end you felt that Roger could just as easily have stepped up another gear if required. So, the excitement is over, and another year’s Wimbledon is at an end, though there will not be one quite like it for a while one suspects.  The game of tennis is a superb contest of skills and temperament, and the part of the game that is maybe the hardest is the psychological one.  This year Andy was much cooler, the work of Ivan Lendl no doubt, but there were still signs of his frustration, the occasional banging of the racquet, the reckless line challenges and the hanging head.  It is this part of Andy’s game that still needs work.  And how important ones serve is, personally I could never serve for toffee; I have no idea where the ball is going when I hit it, and if it gets over the net at all I am as surprised as my opponent.  Federer’s serve was rock solid, and seldom wavered, whereas Murray’s went slowly downhill.

Let us hope that this is a stepping stone in his career, not the pinnacle.  And at least he can comfort himself that he did get to the final, which no other British man has done for over seventy years.  Well done Andy.  And even better done Roger

Sunday 8th July

Of course we in Britain are weather obsessed and always have been.  Though this year it seems we are quite justified, it simply hasn’t stopped raining.  It is now official, April May and June were the three wettest months on record.  And it is all the fault of the Jet-stream moving south.  We get most of our weather from the Gulf of Mexico, flowing across the Atlantic and hitting us with a belt of mild air.  But this year, so the Meterologists say it has shifted a bit south meaning that we are getting the weather that normally passes to the North of us; that is rain and rain and then more rain.  Every year there are unusual weather phenomena all over the world, but I have just seen on the news that Russia has just had severe flooding with about seventy-six people killed, and in America on the Eastern Seaboard they are suffering an unusually ferocious heat-wave.  So is this weather turmoil something unusual, is it the first harbinger of truly devastating stuff to come, is it perhaps the first tangible evidence of Global Warming.  Ever since the financial crash of 2008 the whole worlds attention had been on economics, and the environment has slipped down on the agenda.  But it certainly hasn’t gone away, and is perhaps a far greater threat to mankind than the fate of the euro, or whether China continues its march towards world domination at quite the same pace. The trouble is that even more than the financial crisis, the environmental one requires united action.  And we cannot seem to get different countries to agree on anything at the moment.

But as I write this the sun is shining, apologies to those of you in Devon or anywhere else where there is torrential rain, and though we know it is but a brief respite before the rain begins again, one cannot help but just bask in it for a while.  What the solution may be I really do not know, but I suppose if it is still raining like this in a year’s time, it might just jog someone into action.

Saturday 7th july

And here we go again.  Another Wimbledon, another semi-final, another nail-biting session, as yet again all British hopes are on edge.  1936 was the last time a British man won Wimbledon though I am not sure when we last got a finalist, certainly not in my memory; we always seem to fall at the penultimate hurdle.  And this year Andy was playing really poorly before this tournament, so there was not quite that absurd degree of optimism around him.  But slowly and surely he has progressed and as I write he is playing the number 5 seed, Tsonga.  Murray is two sets up, which in a funny way is more worrying than the other way round.  And if not this year then when will it ever be; Nadal is out, and Djokavic has been beaten by a rejuvenated Federer.  If Andy doesn’t win it this year with only one of the super three to beat then one suspects he never will.  I can hardly bear to watch.  And I didn’t for a while.  Tsonga came back really strong and Murray had to wait for the fourth set to bring the match to a conclusion.

So now we will all have to live through the most trying afternoon on Sunday.  Roger Federer is playing for his seventh Wimbledon singles title, so he wants it just as much.  It really could go either way.  One suspects it will be incredibly close, but we will just have to wait and see.  For now, we can rejoice in at last getting to a final.

Friday 6th july

Phew, at last they have discovered the Higgs Boson, so now it’s all okay – all those complicated theories work.  Well of course, they haven’t actually discovered the Higgs Boson, just what they think might be evidence of its existence; footprints in the snow, so to speak, or possibly indentations or slight irregularities in the midst of a snowstorm that might indicate that a Higgs Boson has passed this way.  No-one has actually seen a Higgs Boson, let alone sub atomic particles such as electrons and protons, and the even smaller quarks and bosons.  And the models we see in text-books of atoms with their pretty colours and orbiting particles surely do not look like this at all; I suspect that if we could see them they would look quite different.  The hardest thing to comprehend is that everything is made of almost entirely nothing.  Not only the Universe itself, where Galaxies are millions of light years apart, but the few and far between and yet still countless millions of stars and planets are also surrounded by huge spaces filled with nothing.  And these lumps of rock are mostly made of nothing.  Everything we can touch and feel is not substantial at all, but is actually a load of nothing with a few atoms holding it all together.  We are mostly water, but water itself despite the fact that we can smell and feel it is almost entirely composed of nothing.  It is all held together by the power of attraction, and the Higgs Boson apparently gives it mass, which is a fancy word for solidity and weight.  It is as if we are all tiny specks of dust suspended in a huge jelly of nothingness.

I am glad that they have discovered the Higgs Boson, (it would have been an expensive experiment if they hadn’t) but it doesn’t really change anything, it just confirms the current theory. I wonder what physicists of the future will make of us, and our primitive understanding of things.  Will they look back on us, as we do on Copernicus and wonder how on earth they could have been so wrong; Higgs Boson was only the start of it, there were entire Universes inside every Boson still to be explored, and all of those were mostly nothing too.  And when they finally discovered God, he was almost entirely nothing too.  Hahaha

Thursday 5th july

I have been steadily reading in chronological order the many works of Anthony Trollope; some are good, some are not so good and some are wonderful.  This much lesser known work should be listed in the excellent.  It is in fact a hoot.; a brilliant satire, and it should be a salutory lesson to anyone going into business.  As a study of human nature it is pretty good too.  Trollope usually sets his characters in the realms of the idle rich, or at least upper middle and leisured classes, though his working class characters are always brilliantly portrayed.  Here though all is set in working class East London, where you can almost smell the brickworks and the dairies; and the struggle for daily survival and the constant need for money are wonderfully evoked.  It is also a sort of love story, though this time with no happy ending, and how satirically the game of getting  a husband is played out, with all it’s subterfuge and devices.  Great stuff, and though the title is a bit wieldy and offputting it is one of his best novels – also quite short, so easy to read too. 8/10

Wednesday 4th july

At times it has seemed that I had the patience of a saint; for all those years waiting for Grandma to acknowledge me as a fully fledged grown-up.  Well,saintly or not, my patience was not rewarded, almost the last words she said to me were dismissing me a spoilt little minx, hardly the acceptance of an equal at all.  But looking back, was my virtue one of patience, or simply one of biting one’s lip, as so often the words I wished to say remained locked firmly in my brain, rattling round and round, but unspoken they only had the power to build up my resentment, and the only one who suffered was me.  So what was so saintly about that?  And anyway, where did this idea of saints being patient come from.  Many of the older saints have been anything but patient, quite the opposite in many cases. And it is patently obvious that in fact all does not come to those who sit and wait.  Those who rush in impatiently and grab whatever they can usually succeed in this life, so in reality patience is not a virtue but rather a crime of negligence, almost akin to laziness, or stubbornness.  And in the case of saints, with the incredibly slow processes of the Catholic church, the patience is in the long wait until they are actually canonized.  Unlike the world of celebrity, which is the new and true religion, where saints are created (no-one simply emerges these days) in days and weeks, and rise to the firmament like shooting stars, streaking across the heavens in their upward trajectory.  True, they usually fizzle and fall to earth like spent fireworks, but most relished the attention while it lasted.  Patience is nowhere rewarded today; stay in a job for more than three years and you are a stick-in-the-mud; those who wait patiently on the backbenches never get picked for high office, and if you sit at home waiting for the right man to come along, forget it – his appearance will rival that of a blue moon, better get down to the clubs and shake your booty if you want to get spotted.  And if you want the world to change then you will truly have to have the patience of a saint – you are in for a long wait.

Tuesday 3rd july

Billy started out doing a sort of homegrown punk, strumming on a solitary electric guitar and singing his strange little songs, raw and unedited.  Short, pithy and always to the point – he was as leftwing as they come, a leading light of Red Wedge in the eighties, a sworn enemy of Thatcher and despite a degree of fame and fortune still true to his beliefs.   And from the earliest songs there was also an amazing degree of honesty about sexual relations with girls, the hopeless fumbles and besotted unrequited love of the young was starkly dissected, and we nodded and understood that that is exactly how it was.  As he has grown older he has charted the trials and tribulations of growing older too, but he has never become cynical, always offering us hope over despair.  And he is unashamedly English, though often ashamed of English bigotry and short-sightedness.  He is also a great individual thinker, appearing quite regularly on Question Time and running rings around the tired political hacks on the panel.  He has never stopped singing in an English Accent too, where most sing a sort of transatlantic American drawl, Billy is never afraid of his own Thames Estuary voice. So from his earliest songs where he was looking for ‘A New England’ to his later more thoughtful songs where ‘Sometimes He Sees The Point.’  Billy is always there, commentating on our lives, and what it is to be human, and always the staunchest defender of the faith.

Monday 2nd july

A bit of good weather and everyone is out trying to get on top of the mess their gardens have become.  Three months of wet weather and the plants have run riot.  And despite what we saw as a lack of sunshine, with overcast and cloudy skies, the sun was still there all along.  The plants do not need blazing sunshine to grow; the chlorophyll in their green leaves reacts to the sun’s rays no matter how thick the cloud-cover.  And all this rain has just been wonderful for them.  So, it was out with the shears and secateurs, and hacking back time.  The amazing tangle of ivy and bindweed and nettles stifling but not killing off all the regular plants you planted a few years ago which are now huge bushes and in some cases trees.  And tomorrow it will be a trip to the recycling centre, everyone with nice green canvas bags, and in some cases a few black sacks full too.

So, despite our moaning about how wet it has been, the gardens have never had it so good,  And that little day in the garden, even if it didn’t feel so warm with a brisk wind blowing, will have done us all the world of good too.  The English seem to need to garden, to nurture and to shape, to clip and to mow, and with so many wet weekends we have had withdrawal symptoms of late.  And now that the work is done and the lawn mown, and the bushes trimmed and the weeds hacked back a bit we too can relax, safe in the knowledge that we will have to do it all again in a few weeks time.