Caught a strange feeling, on the way home from the local garden centre, before it rained. It has a pretty decent food shop and it's been worth using for the reduced price veg I can sometimes ofrage, near the end of its shelf life. The centre was, as it normally is, fairly busy (and almost every visitor wore a mask). It struck me that, I was, for the first time in months, in a busy shop. It felt normal.
The weather has taken a welcome breather; cool breeze and a cessation of temperature related hostilities. I felt relaxed. Autumn is on the way, a time of year I like. There is a release of energy, commensurate with what I just described. Spring and Autumn are like that, periods of change where energy shifts. One moves from the stifling heat of summer or the hibernating cold of winter. These changes are most welcome, and, because of that busy garden centre, it felt as it should.
Then it rained.
I hope that sense of fleeting normality can be reinforced in the months ahead, before winter takes hold. But there are still many challenges. Corona of course; it hasn't gone away. In fact, although some arge cogently otherwise, the rate of infection is problematic. It appears to be rising, but that could be because we have improved our testing. More restrictions are set to ease in the coming days I believe, including, at the start of next month, the new school year. We have no real idea how this is going to play out and I have, as ever, no faith in this incompetent sneering shower posing as a government.
The schools fiasco is just another in a long, dreary, line of incompetence. Not only are these Tories typically Tory - red in bank balance and claw - but they are also thick as the mince I eat for dinner. Gavin Williamson, a jumped up little salesman, commented with nary a shred of self awareness that the government didn't want kids getting above their station, to justify his complete bungling of the exams crisis. Bungling int he sense that it has inadvertently revealed the stark and belligerent class divide so prevalent in Britain. Just one more thing set to amplify with Brexit.
It also appears that this move by the government is illegal and that, hopefully, they will have to rectify it. Automated processes apparently cannot decide people's lives this way. It's actually illegal. Of course when has the law ever stood in the way of Tory power. They are as likely to repeal or alter that law as they are to obey it and give the kids a fair shake. I don't know how that can be done bt we cannot have so transparently biased a system.
This has been a week of thunder in more ways than one, but any fool could have predicted it wouldn't have just been a storm of climate. At the very least it demonstrates that, waiting for us all post Covid, the environment crisis remains. Ignorance will not make it go away and with temperatures as we have seen - possibly increasing further as the problem becomes more acute - everything the Tories crow about now will also exacerbate. Including migration, as people are driven out of increasingly inhospitable and desolate regions. Hoping to find new bread baskets. Is this really a time to "strike out" alone in the world? Will the EU care if migrants all make their way to Britain when we're no loner the EU's problem?
Ours is a lonely path, lead by donkeys and not tigers.
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