I really haven’t reverted to old habits – honest guv. No I have been field testing my new lens and where better than a local country park where there are plenty of birds, I was going to say wild but most of these creatures seem to hang around just waiting to be feed so you decide if that makes them wild. Not a bad set for a first time but I have still got a lot to learn before I am totally comfortable with the lens.
Another day and another enjoyable time with my Apple Pencil.
Some days I wonder what little talent I have – ‘Where the hell has that gone?’ Then for no apparent reason it reappears – glad this isn’t the way I make my living as I don’t think I could cope…but that is a whole other story.
The other day I rewatched V for Vendetta for the first time in our Post Trump/Brexit era and I found myself being chilled to the bones. The first time I watched this movie, some time ago, it was a just a great film of a graphic novel but now? Well I think it is just a whole lot more chilling.
The scene that made me sit up and think more than any was at the start of the movie when Lewis Prothero makes a speech that now has too many resonances with the Fake News attack on the free press. Of course these same distortions of the truth can be found on the other side of the argument which doesn’t make it any more acceptable. We seem to be living in dangerous times.
I guess we all have different memories of National Trust properties when we were growing up. For me it is a total absence of ever having visited a National Trust property . Whether that is true or not I have no objective way of checking. However, what I do remember is being taken to see Staunton Harold reservoir being built and slowly filling up with water. I was not aware that just to the left of the car car park was one of the strangest stately homes in Britain – but then again I suspect I wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t until Calke Abbey was given to the National Trust to look after in the 1980’s that the full strangeness of the house became apparent.
I have been around the house once or twice and once you’ve seen one stuffed animal you’ve seen enough – unfortunately Calke has an abundance of the things which doesn’t really do anything for me. The parkland around the house however is another matter and I find myself visiting the parkland again and again. (Also writing about those visits a lot in this blog.) Yesterday was just the latest in a long line of visits and I can state with out fear of contradiction that Calke Abbey is my favourite National Trust property – although the Farne Islands are up there as well along with….you get the idea.
So the papers are claiming that that is that for summer and we’ll all have to get use to a wet autumn starting early (I suspect that I might have over egged things just a little but as this seems to be the flavour of the moment I guess all I have to add is FAKE NEWS from MSM). Enough of Donald Trump.
Sure enough this morning it did rain quite hard for a while – however afterwards there was an opportunity to explore the effects of the rain in the garden.
So Parliament is in recess for the summer and all those MPs can go back to their constituencies and …well if you are a Tory MP it would seem plot. The latest to let it be known that he is NOT interested in becoming the next Conservative leader if Jacob Rees-Mogg. Mogg, yet another Eton/Oxbridge educated son of money, seems to be cornering the market in sincere intellectual detachment from the real world. He has a quiet charm who may well appeal to the Tory voters, should they get a chance to vote on who their new leader should be – they didn’t last time. I am not so sure about whether this appeal would last long if the great unwashed, i.e those of us who are not Conservative party members, ever get a say in who should be the next Prime Minister but hay that is British democracy for you.
The summer is supposed to be the silly season when stupid stories run and run until the adults get back from their hols – nowadays I get the feeling that isn’t the case anymore.
It is a while since I wrote about the gift that never stops giving – Brexit. To recap it has ended the career of one Prime Minister and will almost certainly consume a second over the next two years; It has allowed endless speculation about all sorts of things that up until the vote last year few people even knew existed (I am aware of the irony of that last statement) and allowed both sides of the argument to engage in their favourite pass time – making up huge porky pies about the other and claiming that only their side of the argument is the right one. In short we are in as big a mess now as we were when the Brexit vote was cast.
When I say we I include the rest of the European Union as much as Britain. I don’t buy the we are all pulling together heading in the same direction narrative being projected by the European Commision when clearly they are not. If you don’t believe me then just take a look at the how Italy is being left to deal with the mounting refugee crisis very much on its own. There are many worthy statements from Brussels but reports from the seafront don’t seem to match the grand rhetoric. Equally, it is assumed that the election of President Macron is some form of new beginning for the European Union – yet he nor his neophyte party and MPs have not been tested and they will face all sorts of pressure over the coming months if they are turn the President’s plans into real change in France. They may well succeed but at this time the ‘New Jupiter’ might just turn out to be just that a huge amount of hot gas with little relative substance underneath. We just don’t know. In short Britain may well be in a right mess but if you look under the surface of the EU they aren’t in any great shape either. At the moment the only thing holding them together seems to be ironically Brexit – whether that will be the case over the next 12 months is another question when the full horrors of how Brexit might damage the EU start to dawn on people within the EU. I know that this isn’t a popular view amongst some people at the moment but as I have already written there are an awful lot of people earn their livings selling things to Britain and if the European Commision bungle things then the unity of the 27 will collapse very quickly indeed.
An example of this is the nonsense trying to remove Euro clearing from the city of London. Now I am no expert on these matters and so what I am about the write might be full of incorrect or misunderstood facts but very simply the Euro Currency needs the city of London to work. By the city I mean everything, legal services, insurance service, knowhow – the whole package. So if you are a large German manufacturer who wants to convert your dollar earnings into Euros then this takes place in the City – there really is nowhere else to do this. There have been many reports of the European Commision wanting this work to be undertaken within the boundaries of the European Union but there is nowhere for this to be undertaken – not at Frankfurt and certainly not Paris. Perhaps one day there may be but not in the foreseeable future and so if this isn’t sorted out there will be a huge hole at the centre of the Euro which can be papered over but only by adding cost and uncertainty to the whole process. Then there is the question question of corporate loans and the European Investment Bank.
So far this is sounding very Eurosceptic but it really isn’t meant to be. What I am trying to say and I think I have been saying this from day one of this home grown cock up is that Britain needs the European Union and the European Union needs Britain far more than they are letting on. It is in both of our interests to stop the ‘who’s got the biggest cock?’ posturing and accept that in truth we need one another. We screw this up and we are both losers and there is no place on either side for no deal. Both sides will have to accept uncomfortable compromises otherwise…well I am not sure where we go from there – turmoil in the short term as … lets just say it won’t be the sunny uplands that still seem to be the myth being put about by the Brexiteers. I believe the current metaphor is the Chocolate Orange which of course was once manufactured in York by a British company but is now manufactured in Poland by a huge American multinational.
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