Blogsy be Kind

Will Blogsy be kind tonight? I don't know. I hope so, but the internet signal goes from weak to disappeared so maybe not.

For the record, it's Saturday night. I am sitting in the forecabin with a blanket over my legs and I am warm and cosy. MasterB is on the bed where he has spent most of the day after being extraordinarily vocal for extraordinarily long amounts of time during the night.

I slept in once he allowed me to sleep at all.

He has had shore leave, two lots in fact. One he decided quite quickly he wanted to get back on board, the other he was looking increasingly confident, had just dug a shallow hole and squatted down when a couple approached from the far end of the marina. I thought they were heading for a car, but no they continued towards us, presumably going to the pub a mile or so away. MasterB lowered himself to his belly and scuttled back to the boat and the indoor facilities.

Earlier I went to the organic farm and bought some salad. There wasn't much in the shop. An architect called Colin who I met in the car park explained the lack of rain has held growth back. He started the conversation by asking me if I came there often, a cliché so hackneyed I wasn't sure what he meant. It turns out he helps at the farm once a week and is married. By some curious chemistry we quickly devined each other as non Tory Remainers. That's how I came to stand in the April sunshine for a good thirty minutes clutching the money I still owed to the shop's honesty box while we agreed on almost everything. There was a sticky moment when he asked if the Daily Mail was my newspaper. To dignify the Mail by calling it a newspaper is several steps too far in my book.

My hair is newly very short, but I'm sure I clutched it when we were talking about the election will achieve. It's just more confusion. Theresa May and UKIP want it to be about Brexit without any apparent strategy for what plans are in place, so a blank cheque for which the people have voted I imagine. I saw a headline in a brief moment when my email account was aligned with the signal that the EU has published its clear and united agenda for Brexit. I suspect TM is gnashing her pearly whites, as now she will presumably have to respond. Well done Donald Tusk. If she comes over all bellicose the EU will be able to remind her of the UK's position; if she sounds conciliatory the hard Brexiteers will be furious.

I've said already that for me the election is about other issues, that although I don't want Brexit to happen and hope and pray that somehow it won't, at the moment it looks like we're on a path with no room for U turns, so the important thing is to know that the environment, the NHS, social care will not be casualties. Already the government has tried to use the lead up to the election to delay dealing with air quality. Once we are away from EU controls over environmental matters the days of clean beaches, air pollution controls, restricted use of poisonous pesticides in farming, and goodness only knows what protections in animal husbandry are all to likely to give way to regressive, harmful practices dictated by those all powerful economic forces.

I can see nothing but chaos and destruction in the immediate future for this country, dressed up as success by political spin. My colleague Brian, a keen student of history and a wiser person than I am, says that history teaches us that these things will pass. In the meantime, I worry about how long that will take, and if I shall be alive to see it.

1st May marks not only my birthday but also twenty years since Labour under Tony Blair won a landslide election victory. How long ago it seems. Yet I can still remember the frustration of not being able to sit up into the night to watch the results as I was freelancing the next day for a magazine aimed at opthamologists (I spent most of the time calling various companies concerned with ocular matters and asking how they thought the new government would affect them).

But enough of this gloom. Tomorrow Older Nephew is coming to das Boot in the early afternoon. We are going to go to Ely. Celia is celebrating her son's mother-in-law's birthday with a family lunch in London then getting the train to Ely. If all the stars align correctly Nephew and I shall arrive shortly before she does, find a convenient place to tie up and then the three of us will return to the marina by boat and eat a chick pea curry that is already prepared and in the bottom of the fridge.

Older Nephew will then drive off into the sunset; Celia, whose birthday was last week, will stay until Tuesday morning; MasterB will allow us to sleep uninterrupted and the sun will shine warmly and benignly.

Amen to that.

 

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