I was given 6 freshly laid eggs by a delightful family who rescue dogs, chickens and children.
The eggs are dated in pencil and now lay in a brown bowl, sitting on a round wooden bread board gifted to me by Anthony Worrall Thompson. The rain has drenched the pear tree outside the window and four wet, pink roses are holding on.
I’ve made a coffee in the machine and have already started on the Sunday papers. I remember asking Terry Frisby – the writer of ‘There’s a Girl in my Soup’ – how did he read his paper, after all with so many pages where do you start? He said he scoured the headlines and if they took his fancy he would read the article. So with a big cup of coffee, three dates and the rain pitter-pattering on the skylight. I begun with the front page.
‘Top Tories say Johnson return would risk the party’s death.’ I ignored it.
Pages 2,3,4 and 5 are all about Johnson and the leadership race. I ignored it.
Pages 6 and 7 are all about the hyperbolic Truss. People who went to school with her, and university, attest that she always had a TRAIT OF CERTITUDE.
I stopped and read bits. Then I looked up the definition of ‘certitude.’ Whichever way you scramble your eggs the shortest PM in British history, stinks of certitude. She reeks of semantic satiation – you know when you say the same thing over and over and then it ceases to make sense. The smirking Trusspot even stood behind her curly podium and gaslighted the nation by suggesting that she couldn’t deliver because of our failings. That smirking skank suggested that in a parallel universe she would have showered us with health, wealth and a perfect pension pot.
Many years ago I was part of a left wing, agitational theatre group. We had passion and energy and a team of thespians that believed that good inflections could bring down Capitalism. Of course it was an idealistic claim but youth is all about waving the flag of freedom. Unless you’re in Italy pf course where the flag of Fascism is flying on the splintered poles of disillusioned voters. But I digress.
As well as touring round the country and picking up accolades we also collected for good causes. Collecting buckets for fighting the National Front. Buckets for Rock against Racism. Pails of pennies to ‘Kill the bill’ and even more buckets for ‘Reclaiming the Night’ for nocturnal women.
Our audiences were generous and our buckets overflowed with good intentions.
And then we hired a young man who sung like Frank Sinatra, had been in the military and had been through the ranks of every political pursuasian from the far right to the Socialist Workers Party.
After a particularly good bottling session we had in the region of £600 (£9,000 in todays money) loadsa money. Oh how we crowed. And then the money went missing.
I knew it was our new recruit; the old git knew it was the new recruit. But the majority pf the company who were left wing intellectuals with a moral certitude and a need for justice, felt we had to wait until the money was returned, or at least discuss it with the blow-in scumbag.
So long did this process of waiting and voting, discussing and lobbying take, by the time there was a united front the scoundrel had gambled all that money away and disappeared with all the lolly never to be seen again. I mention this because it’s like the Tory party gambling on the stock market with our pensions and lives. Those duplicitous dodos hide in plain sight, they can see the sculduggery of the returning Boris but politeness and self serving cowardice means that the roly-poly jammy dodger may well be re-instated by a group of people who care less about the struggles of the majority in favour of the well being of a tranche of moneyed wankers.
As head masters/mistresses/fluid head binaries weep about making a choice between teachers and free school meals the leadership battle trundles on like a tundril full of corpses on the cobble stones of a blood stained boulevard.
As swimming pools shut, as people whip out their own teeth, as candles are being bulk bought in preparation for a winter of blackouts, the unruly Tories sit and chatter in their sitting rooms sipping on silver tipped tea as the rest of the country goes to hell in a hand basket.
Labour party membership soars but nothing is guaranteed in the world of social artfulness, Conservative cunning, Rishi foxiness or Boris crookery. Remember that Mordaunt was once a magicians assistant – she knows the art of humbuggery. That creaky bunch of quacks have run away with our bucket of money, we see it and hear it, we smell it and know it, but we are nailed to the floor by a bunch of besuited bastards who have sweet talked us into submission. Politely we protest, and when it does get sticky we’re led into a hall of mirrors where climate change is but a distraction when the economy is tanking and poor fuckers are being primed to pay the bill.
Look, we have private medicine so who gives a gurney whether nurses are able to fix our bleeding hearts.
We have parcel delivery services so who gives a shit about Tommy the postman who has an underactive thyroid and an ill performing pension. Tommy will go the way of Croatian care workers and Latvian fruit pickers.
We’re in a mess but the bucketeers will stash the cash then take off on vacation for a well deserved break in Giorgia Meloni’s fascist Italy. Or take a cruise round the newly elected fascist Swedish islands. Those squeaky clean knurly kunts will gather in corners and conspire and plot our futures as we sit in the dark unable to light the candles as we have no matchers. Our bridges are burnt.
Trust your gut, my friends, because whatever they say, if it looks like shit and smells like shit, it is unequivically a pile of shit. Let us gather together with our buckets and spades and get ready to shovel that shit onto the dust heap of their archaic certitude.