“What a lot of weather
We’ve been having lately” (Neil Innes, Mr Eurovision (1980))
On Thursday we had the local elections in England, and it soon became clear that people were going to express their annoyance with the sitting Conservative Government. The Tory party has been involved in a couple of scandals: William Wragg resigned after handing over the personal phone numbers of senior party officials to a friend on Grindr, and Mark Menzies was accused of misusing party funds to pay off kidnappers. So far, about 18 MPs have been forced to leave the Conservatives due to inappropriate conduct.
London was hit two days ago by an epic thunderstorm. Abu Dhabi and Dubai were both hit by extreme rainfall and flooding last month. And flooding has caused widespread damage and hundreds of deaths in Kenya and Somalia, while recent reports said that heavy rain caused flooding in Brazil, leading to the collapse of a hydroelectric dam and killing dozens of people.
When I turned on the TV news I found a young woman standing in front of a UK map covered in angry red patches. However, it soon became clear that this was not a high-pollen warning, but a chart showing the progress of Labour party councillors as they gradually expelled Tory incumbents from various northern regions.
A few years back, the Times reported on Prince William wearing a Charlton Athletic footie shirt. William is now the P-of-W, and to celebrate their 13th wedding anniversary, Kate and William released a photo from the archives. I remember being at work the day of the wedding, since we had to carry out regular weekly test cycles, moving specimens from one machine to another.
Yesterday we went to Stockport for a day out. The place was buzzing; well-dressed young people perched at the bar, enjoying expensive burgers and Spanish beer. A bunch of teenage lads on pushbikes hurtled past in a trail of reefer smoke. A small crowd had gathered around a fallen man, with patches of deep red blood on the pavement. As we sat outside, an Airbus 380 went overhead in grand slow-motion; how many billions of dollars of corporate wealth was hanging above us for those few seconds?
5 May 2024: Today we went out to Warrington, and had coffee in the Market Square by the statue of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Then we went off to find the house where George Formby lived at Stockton Heath, and then we looked at the Graveyards in Stockton Heath (St Thomas) and Appleton Thorn (St Cross).
I toy with the idea of taking the names from the headstones, and creating fictitious letters between the deceased, as if they might have been friends in life, and then decided to continue corresponding after death. How many secrets were carried away by people in the years before 1990 – which is approximately the point where UK society began to embrace the possibility of being humane and tolerant and civilised, and where it stopped being necessary to lie about who you were, and what you did, and where you came from.
Books of Solid Stone
The same old trees, when April changes into May
Defend the grey stone walls
That fill the church with emptiness
And though we see the words he wrote and things he said
We’ll never know exactly what he thought
Instead of bars, the music is
Divided into coloured shapes from which
Each player takes an angle of relief;
Do not these sounds all magnify the glory
Of the host?
These sleeping shadows, upright stones
Will point us to another life, another world
where moving through the day
Left little time for calculus or dreams
And so, the seasons drift and change, our
Fading future turning inside-out as
Names and dates are all that now remain
In granite marble carving walls
Where golden letters hang with rigid eloquence
novalis848 