It was the first dawn of the cold spell that is heading our way for the next few days and it was just me, a couple of friendly dogs, a Green Woodpecker and a few Wigeon. The wigeon are easy to spot on the local pond but the woodpecker far less so. Nonetheless both make their presents felt as they filled the air with their calls.
As for the cold toes well they quickly warm up again when I get home and any discomfort it was worth it for glorious frost dawn. It should be colder over the next few days so my toes have been warned!
Christmas is coming and with it comes the end of the year. All very normal, all very festive but, and this is a very elephant size butt, I now have to start the process of creating my yearbooks and 2022 has proved to be a creative drought. Compared to 2021, which was a bumper year for content creation, I have very little work to fill my art yearbook. Now this is a problem of my own making and compared to all the other problems in this crazy world not worth even a nanosecond of consideration. However, that is not the only world I inhabit, my goodness this is getting very metaphysical, but in my world it is a big thing.
I can only hope something of a creative tsunami will metaphorically hit me over the next few days to help alleviate this bleak vista.
Here we go again…a few days of respite and I am again feeling ‘under the weather’. Long Covid or something else? I don’t know but the one thing it has meant is, for various reasons, I am out walking the mean streets early in the morning.
So October was all about COVID: catching it, enduring it and recovering from it. November has now disabused me of any notion that I am finished with COVID. Instead I have been suffering from fatigue. I caught what was probably a cold and instead of taking a couple of days to clear has now taken the best part of two weeks and I still don’t feel right. The last time I actually captured a photograph in anger was back on the 24th October. I now have to plan my day around the fact that should I do some form of exercise, say go for a short walk, I will probably feel not fir for much afterwards. It is getting better but it is so frustrating.
These past few days have seen the weather change and then change again. The autumn leaves are being washed from the trees and plants by the wind and rain we have endured – we even had very explosive thunder and lightning storms the other night as well (I know nothing compared to other parts of the world but for Britain in mid to late October they were something). The upshot of this is that the images I have captured reflect this. Perhaps I should get out a bit more!
Grand opening of a new Dunkin’, not sure what happened to the Donut? – Probably Brexit or a Romainer problem. In the real world things are entering into a total meltdown and yet the world goes on.
Only 9 days to the end of October … wonder how many Prime Ministers we’ll got through by then?
I think I’ve said enough about the madness engulfing what passes for our political class apart from to make one observation…over the past few days I have head and read that Britain is fast becoming ungovernable … this is not the case. The Conservative Party are now ungovernable and not wishing to be a stickler for detail they don’t represent the country as a whole. Indeed, our crazy voting system, at least at UK level, means that the Conservatives in in their Johnsonian pomp never had anything like a majority in the country as a whole. Just a point I thought worth making.
The rest, as the saying goes, is politics which is what I was listening to whilst capturing these images.
So she has gone … thank you for everything you did for the country … Liz Truss you’ll not be forgotten in a while! So we will have yet another Leader of the Conservative Party by this time next week (This isn’t a hostage to future striff at all!?!) who will no doubt make grandiose claims about unity, the honour of it all, the hard work ahead … and and and no one will be listening. He, I think it will be he (see below), will have as long as it takes him to cross Downing Street before the Conservative Party will collapse around him. Will he last as long as Liz Truss? It is not such a silly question.
The Boris Question
Will he Won’t he run? I’m sure there are parts of the Conservative Parliamentary Party (CPP) who get all hot and excited at this thought but my guess he is enjoying becoming very rich to bother with being Prime Minister again – plus he just doesn’t have the votes. So I don’t think he would run.
What About the Bakerite Wing of the CPP?
Last night Steve Baker was touring the TV interview booths talking as if he was a senior member of the Government, he’s not. Baker’s power has always been his ability to disrupt. He simply doesn’t have the votes to take a candidate into Downing Street. This means that the likes of Suella Braverman is unlikely to be able to get elected. I suspect that Kemi Badenoch won’t even try to run but rather save herself for the fights to come – the first being trying to keep her seat in a General Election in 2023
PM for PM?
The ever popular Penny Mordaunt has got to be a strong candidate. She certainly performs well at the dispatch box; she has a competent TV appearance but, and this is why I don’t think she’ll be elected, she hasn’t actually done anything. Yes she was defence Secretary for a few weeks but nothing more. We are heading into a winter of great confusion and strife so having a PM who is untested at the highest level really isn’t an option plus she couldn’t beat Liz Truss at the last CPP elections in the summer.
Time for Rishi
Cometh the hour Cometh the man – possibly. Rishi Sunak does have the advantage of coming a surprisingly close second to Liz Truss and he did warn everyone listening of what would happen under a Truss Premiership so of course he is bound to win – right? Well I’m not at all sure and even if he does whole sections of the CPP despise him for numerous reasons. If he does win then he will have to be very, very, lucky not to cause another crazy Tory war the moment he walks through the door at No. 10. I don’t any Tory has that luck anymore.
A.N. Other or None of the Above
Given the crazy nature of things at the moment a Gnome for PM may make as much sense as anything else that is going to happen over the next week. Meanwhile the world outside SW 1 is looking on and thinking …how did it come to this? The contempt that the CPP is showing to the electorate at large is breathtaking and I suspect the pressure from outside will become way too much. Perhaps not an election before the end of the year but I can’t see this holding together beyond the end of the year … maybe not that long. Over to His Majesty.
That was two weeks I’ll never get back but I have come out the otherside with few apparent long term issues (this may be tempting providence…I hope not but…). During this time of isolation I have sat about a lot and not really done much at all – other than get over COVID which is not an achievement to sniff at. So to mark my release I have decided to undertake one of the most cliched photographic project – take a photograph a day for the rest of October. To add just a small twist I have decided to only use one lens per day so today it was my 85mm f1.8. Let’s see how long this lasts!
PS…I know that there are four photos…I didn’t promise consistancy!
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