Saturday 27th April

I have come here ostensibly to get on with some decorating, painting the Garden Room.  And it is quite a large room with a long sloping roof, so a big job.  I suspect it will take two coats (at least)  but still tackle it I must.  I have spent the greater part of the day painting white emulsion onto walls and ceilings, the paint being absorbed like ink on blotting paper, so I have used almost 10 litres of the stuff and still some to do.

And with Kris Kristofferson on repeat as my accompaniment what could be more pleasant.  The repetitive action with the occasional break for making tea, or moving a few bits of furniture around becomes almost hypnotic.  I enter some sort of trance-like state when painting.  And though I would love it to be oils, and one day it will, there isn’t that much difference in a way.  It is the getting lost in the thing that I love, that drifting away into another state, that semi-automatic but still using a fair bit of concentration that frees the mind to wander, sometimes singing along to Kris, sometimes lost in a whirl of thoughts even I cannot begin to retrace.  A degree of evaluation of one’s life, and okay – this ‘aint the Sistine Chapel, but in its way just as valuable, if any human activity can be judged as having any value in the grand scheme of things.

So, a day painting, and now quite tired I am in a funny way elated.  Escaped the rush and nonsense of London, the absolute meaninglessness of my work, the close and sometimes stifling personal relationships.  Alone for a day or two I can begin to get my sanity back.  And tomorrow more painting; white satinwood gloss this time which in a way is even more satisfying as it simply glides off your brush and on to the wood.

Tonight live music at Gambetta – hope it is good.

Friday 26th April

I am back in Eymet, and have slipped into the place like a pair of espadrilles.  The weather is quite hot, and after a few sunny days in England – I mean hot.  Almost sunbathing weather.  The journey is dead easy, and I feel like an old pro, timing it to perfection.  The security still annoys the fuck out of me, even having to remove my shoes nowadays, and for some bizarre reason I seem to set the x-ray arch off every time and have to be patted down.   The flight itself is dead easy, you just have to completely ignore the cabin crew who try to sell you something at every possible moment.

Jackie, our neighbour picked me up and in no time I was back in the house.  I walked up to the supermarche and bought a few staples, and the new greengrocers for salads and the boulangerie for pain.  So, sorted.

I know I say this every time, but I could really get used to living out here, and may well do when I retire, at least for half the year, as most of the English do.  Though they do stretch it from early March to November.  And with the internet and cheap flights why not.

So, I am here for a couple of days of painting in the Garden Room, but tonight I am relaxing.

Au revoir pour ce moment.

Thursday 25th April

I am writing this on Wednesday, but you will be reading it the day the OBR publishes the latest quarterly GDP figures.  So, I really do not know yet the extent of the damage, though I suspect that George Osborne does, and will be preparing his defence.  We had a 0.3 percent contraction in the three months to Christmas, and to be honest the signs are quite mixed as to whether things are improving or not.  Technically if the economy contracts again we will have a triple dip recession, for the first time in our be-knighted history.

Not that it actually matters either way; even the most positive of pundits are predicting only 0.1 or 0.2 % growth.  To be quite honest these figures are only provisional and are like a snapshot of a rapidly moving picture, and will be revised up or down a couple more times before settling down and become regarded as some sort of accurate.

My gut feeling is that George will be lucky and will escape a Triple Dip.  He was incredibly lucky with the deficit figures, again coming in just a sliver lower than last year.  The importance is far more political than economic.  But the really important factors are those looking ahead.  The euro-zone is still in crisis, and looking to at least another year of flat or negative growth.  America is slowing down too, as is China, although we would all die for figures above 5% growth.

Or would we?  It is surely a sign of a very unbalanced World that there are such variances in our fortunes.   Some economists are now looking at decades of stagnation in the West, which puts all of our political parties in trouble, as they all insist the way out of our troubles is to get back to growth.   What if growth is simply not achievable anymore, and the best we can hope for is bumping along the bottom?  Does there come a point when debts become too high and major countries cannot afford to repay the interest anymore?  Or maybe a completely new way of looking at things will emerge.

The other far more worrying statistic is that in one year the number of people resorting to free food banks had trebled.  And the changes in benefits will only exacerbate this.  It is all very well for politicians to pull long faces and shake their heads at the failures of the party opposite.  Does anyone have the solution to how to distribute fairly what limited wealth we still have?

Wednesday 24th April

I was hot yesterday.  And not only on the overcrowded tube but all day.  The office on Monday is often freezing, North facing and rarely touched by the sun, the one radiator in the office barely getting mildly warm.  But yesterday it was a gloriously sunny day and I was hot.  As usual without really thinking I had put on a jumper, one of two I bought in the Next sale on Boxing day actually.  I pulled it over my head, and tucked my cuff-linked shirt into the sleeves, not the most elegant of sartorial arrangements, but needs must – and besides at a certain age comfort overtakes fashion and as long as you are warm and comfy who cares quite what you look like.

So for the first time in months I took my jumper off at work.  And today I decided the jumper had to stay at home, not even secreted in the bottom of my bag for an emergency.  I wore shirtsleeves and my gilet I bought in France, and so far I have been fine.  No, really.  Not even a tad cold.   Looking around me I can see many are unsure, a few, maybe out of habit are still wearing thick coats or anoraks, some still wearing a woolly something or other, but a few like me are in shirtsleeves.   Though I haven’t yet seen a gilet; black jackets seem de rigeur today I am afraid.

Mind you I haven’t consigned the jumper to the bottom of the wardrobe just yet, it is still sitting there watching and waiting, because it, like all of us knows only too well how our weather can deceive us into thinking it might actually be Spring.

Tuesday 23rd April

Am I the only one to be surprised by people’s reactions to disaster.  In the last week we have had three quite extraordinary events; the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt, shootouts and arrest; the Texas Fertiliser Plant explosion, and the Chinese earthquake.  The number of dead in each case was approximately 2, 15 and a couple of hundred.  And yet the newsworthiness of the three was in diminishing proportion to the number of dead.

The Chinese earthquake was I suppose understandable; earthquakes happen quite regularly, and it is in China, a long way off.  Compared to many earthquakes 200 dead is a lot, but one a few years ago, again in China killed about 10,000.  And yet we hardly blink an eye at the news.

The Boston marathon was a particularly nasty incident, and the perpetrators showed no mercy for their victims.  Luckily although a lot were injured there were only two dead in the explosions.  As usual both the main suspects were gunned down by the police,though only one fatally, although one policeman did die also in the gun battles.  Is this another awful consequence of America’s attitude to guns.  It seems that both the criminals and the police resort to blasting each other at the earliest opportunity.  Mind you it saves a lengthy court case if the guilty are killed by the police I suppose.  Maybe it was the fact that the original explosions were at such a ‘happy’ event as a marathon that caused it to be so newsworthy.

Then there is the fertilizer plant fire and explosion where brave firefighters and innocent people died.   There was a day of coverage when they had lots of pictures of the fire and the explosion, but the story has gone strangely quiet since, despite the large number of dead and the devastation.  It is quite possible that crimes were committed here too; maybe more of negligence than commission, but at the moment no-one seems to be that bothered.

I just find it strange that the number of dead in each story has little relevance to the importance placed on it, not only by the media, but Facebook too, which was groaning with good wished for the Bostonians, but absolutely nothing for those from Texas or China.

Monday 22nd April

As we drive backwards and forwards most weekends we cannot help but notice the state of the trees which tend to line the motorway.  They are almost all green now, but not with leaves.  They are a sweet limey green and are covered in moss or lichen from all the rain, but hardly any of their buds are open as yet.  Last Easter everything was green with new spring leaf, but it is as if we are a month late now.  The gorse bushes are just opening out into yellow flowers, and like Wordsworth we are surprised every now and then by a host of yellow daffodils, all turned with their faces towards the sun.

We have a chestnut tree outside our sitting room window and it is just the right height to observe the buds, they are bulging and a whitey green colour and in a day or two if this warm weather continues they will burst into life as leaves.  Then we will really know the spring has arrived.  I can remember as a five year old in infant’s school, and we had a bit of twig in a jam jar of water on the window ledge.  The bud was dark brown and sticky and every day we were asked to look at it to see if the bud was getting bigger.  I cannot really remember the leaves emerging, bud the sticky touch and brown colour has stayed with me.   We also had pussy willow, and lots of wild flowers in our classrooms, and would regularly go on nature rambles down country lanes, observing the buttercups, and meadow orchids and cow parsley and bull rushes, and the buds on the trees.

I expect that there is no time for that sort of thing nowadays, and besides it probably isn’t in the National Curriculum, or maybe Ofsted would mark you down for indulging these children.  But despite all that kids are crammed with nowadays I am amazed at how little of the world they know.  On Junior Apprentice recently both teams had to obtain some objects, one of which was a votary and another was a candelabra.  Neither team of five very bright and precocious kids had ever heard of either.  And I wonder how many of them will even notice the buds on the tress, and wonder when they will actually open.

Sunday 21st April

Two sunny weekends doesn’t make a Summer, or even a spring because the temperature is still un-seasonally cold, but it does make everyone a whole lot happier.

We are again at Walton, and it is even sunnier and slightly warmer than last weekend.  The town is packed with not only the local residents, but the caravan owners are pouring down to air and clean their vans for the summer.  All along the front you can see beach huts being opened, awnings being spread, wind-breaks unraveled, deckchairs unfolded.  And then there are the day-trippers, who on a whim have descended on the town, to walk along the front, breathe in that fresh sea air, maybe a stroll on the beach then into town for fish and chips or pie and mash.  And everyone has a smile on their faces, including the resolute shop and café owners who had a thin time of it last year, and some are hanging on by the skin of their teeth just trying to survive.  But all those worries are cast aside, people are out spending at last.  And whether we are in a triple-dip or just flat-lining really doesn’t matter to most people.  They are somehow coping, and now that the sun is here they just want to relax, tilt their faces to the warmth, and send a few pounds on a nice lunch.

Amazing – two sunny weekends in a row – is that some sort of record?

Saturday 20th April

Even if she had never released a single album she would deserve to be up there amongst the greats of Modern Music, as she was simply one of the best songwriters ever.  She started her career in the early sixties in the Brill building in Manhattan, which was a sort of song factory.  In those days pre-Beatles and pre-Dylan, hardly anyone wrote their own material.  In a way they didn’t need to; there was a whole army of songwriters beavering away for every aspiring pop-star.  One of them was Neil Diamond, and here in Britain Gallagher and Lyle were songwriters before they tried their hand at singing.   Carole King wrote many many great songs which became huge hits, often with Gerry Goffin.

Well in 1970 she started to record her own songs and had a string of four sublime albums from ‘Writer’ to ‘Rhymes and Reasons.’   There was a time, probably for almost two years when you couldn’t go to a party anywhere without hearing ‘Tapestry’ being played on the hi-fi.  It was incredibly popular and was in the charts for over two years.  And it is simply beautiful, and marries pop and soul with a touch of jazz and country in there too.  Carole played piano and her songs are full of plangent chords that simply roll over you, and the words are universal too; ‘Will you still love me Tomorrow’, ‘You make me feel like a Natural Woman’ and everyone’s favourite ‘You got a Friend’ sung with James Taylor, with whom it is rumoured she had a thing going on.

I really don’t care, I simply know that Tapestry would be on my greatest 50 album ever list.  It is that good.

Friday 19th April

Ever since the economic collapse of 2008/2009 the right wing has been a bit shamefaced.  Here was a debacle brought about by greed and manipulation of the so-called ‘free market’, and no-one could really defend it.  But slowly bit by bit the blame has been shifted to the regulators, even though everyone in the City was crying out for ‘light touch’ and self-regulation in the years since the ‘Big Bang’ in the mid-eighties when most restrictions on trading and capital controls were lifted.   The other excuse for the current deficit and ever-increasing debt was that Labour spent too much under Blair and Brown, even though George Osborne and Cameron in opposition promised to maintain public spending at the same levels.  In fact of course it was Labour saving at least three banks from collapse, and incidentally, our whole economy crashing, that caused the deficit.  Not over-spending but a drastic fall in revenue caused by the global crash.

And now of course, the situation is so dire that hardly anyone can defend it, let alone praise the current policies.

So, how beneficial was Margaret Thatcher’s death to the right wing.  They could treat the whole thing as a huge and protracted party political broadcast, reminding people – or actually telling lies, about how wonderful she was, how her policies saved Britain.

And true, the economy was miraculously altered in 1990 from that in 1979.   The strange thing is that this miraculous change also happened in America, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and in fact all over the Western world.  And of course in most of those countries they didn’t have the class warfare and destruction of manufacturing and mass unemployment that we had here.  The truth is that the economic turnaround was a result of factors completely outside any Governments control.   Thatcher was not a genius, just a nasty woman in the right place at the right time.

I wonder though, now that the dust may be allowed to settle, whether History will eventually tell a different story than this party political broadcast on behalf of the right wing.

Thursday 18th April

And so, despite all the hoo-haa about Mrs. Thatcher, economics still matter.  The International Monetary Fund, a pretty conformist organisation has warned George Osborne that his policies are not working and that he should consider relaxing the rate of Austerity and spending more.

The economy was actually recovering in 2010 when the Tories came into power, and rather than take things slowly and really assess the position, they began to believe their own rhetoric and a sort of panic set in.  Rash decisions were taken and an economic plan that was inflexible and fixed for five years set in motion.  The result was that people became scared and stopped spending and the economy nose-dived.  The deficit has been reduced but most of this happened in the first year, and it is debatable whether there has been any improvement since.  Labour’s plan was to keep growth going and to reduce the deficit by slowly reducing spending while revenue would increase because of higher growth.

The truth is that George Osborne believes inherently that Public Spending is bad, and that the Private sector is good.  The deficit was just the excuse to cut back on the hated public sector, and he is so stubborn that despite the damage he has inflicted on the country he still believes he is right.   The sad thing is that even despite his policies – at some point, maybe later this year – things will start to improve and he will claim a somewhat belated victory.

Economics is like pulling a brick on a piece of elastic along a table top; nothing happens for ages and then the brick hits you smack in the eye.  Austerity isn’t working, therefore pile on more Austerity as we obviously weren’t Austere enough in the first place.