... do not sound a trumpet before you ...

If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

 George Orwell

"Do not feed the troll" is the lesson instilled in every child from the first gift of the internet at whatever early age is thought suitable these days... to which has now been added the age old edict "Do not give to the beggar" the mot du jour of the local Council. Your left hand seems to have discovered that your right hand has been doing good works to those deemed to be living an "at risk" lifestyle and your left hand is most unhappy. Your spare change might be helping buy that guy's next fix of whatever nice chemical he chooses to escape from the drudge of living in the city of culture, your scruffy little beggar may well be in fact a con artist (who isn't these days? Is it not written that all will be fake and all manner of things shall be fake...) with a nice flat paid for by housing benefit; your beggar is a smack head, a spiced out zombie, the scum of the earth, a drag on the social budget, a filthy stinking rotten nuisance ... that is your beggar so don't you go giving the beggar your precious pennies. No, give it instead to a Council approved list of charities who will see to it that your money goes to all the right places, the acceptable places, the 'deserving' places, ... all of course via the charities' very reasonable expense accounts, they have to live after all, they have rent to pay, managers to pay, they aren't a charity ... erm ... and somewhat like Orwell I see little difference between the beggars on  Jameson Street and Whitefriargate and the charities set up to do "good works": they just cut out the middle man. 

And I won't lie; I don't give to either.

The Cottingham Cock

It was Cottingham Day not last Sunday but the one before and I've only just seen the few photos I took on the day, this being the most interesting of a dull batch. Cottingham Day used to be held on Saturdays but it got too popular (it was hellish!) so those who run it moved it to the Sunday to keep it reasonably crowded ... This fine upstanding specimen has put me in mind of a very earthy song by the late Jake Thackray I'll see if I can find it ...

Tide has transfigured them into Untruth.

.... What will survive of us is mud.
 

(With apologies to Mr Larkin)

Chutzpah and a bit more

Chutzpah, I think that's the word to describe taking your money then giving you some of it back and saying that it's being spent for your own good. No doubt there will still be recalcitrant remain minders, keepers of the dying flame (meeting in darkened rooms and secretly drinking to the bureaucratic kings over the water) who will point to this, wag the compulsory finger at us and say "look what you will be missing" come October 31st, Big Boris Day, le grand jour de départ (should it ever happen). But the EU simply gives us back some of our own money and, what's more, tells us how to spend it ... why any self-respecting people would put up with this crap I cannot imagine ... plus it's proposed new leaders (like the old lot before them) are  unelected, unaccountable failed despicable politicians and crooks. 

But ... taking your money and spending on projects that are supposed to be for your benefit is the nature of all government, I suppose. So you'll see a wee sign for "Northern Powerhouse". This is a quango more spoken of than existing in actuality. It seems to have mythic qualities in that it will regenerate the whole north of England without being a real entity. By merely repeating it three times it comes into being and renovates those parts that generations of neglect and disinvestment have ruined.

The Humberside Local Enterprise Partnership, another quango,  was recently criticised for failing to deliver any jobs boost despite receiving millions of central government (ie taxpayers') money.

Hull City Council we have met many times over the years; it is led by simple folk with simple ideas, as in simply ridiculous ideas. One of the latest is to take over empty shops in Whitefriargate and give them to young entrepreneurs to start up businesses. This is so self-evidently bonkers it could only come from folk with no business sense: so, off the top of my head, for example, what about the existing shops that will have to compete with non-rent paying businesses? Hardly fair, is it? I'm sure the EU would have something to say about it (see, I can do irony ...) But then fairness is not something HCC is noted for. So then let us ask who gets the money, why it'll be the greedy landlords who would otherwise be sitting on empty units demanding too high rents for the market until the simpletons of HCC come along with an open cheque book and an account filled with taxpayers' money ... the party of labour subsidising the landlords is an irony seemingly too rich for the simple folk of city hall ... and why help only young entrepreneurs? why can't grey bearded loons drink at the deep well of municipal benefice? 

Time limitations and good manners preclude me from expanding on the Environment Agency ... and Bmmjv are the recipients of all our money in case you wondered where it all went.

You don't need a weatherman...

I came across this weather vane the other day; it's on top of the old dock offices on High Street. It's new to me but looks as though it could have been there for years in which case how did I miss it when I posted the building a few years back. This little ship must be one of the few that can sail close to the wind without coming about and all that tacking nonsense beloved of nautical folk. (I admit I get all my sailing jargon from a childhood spent reading Swallows and Amazons ... 'Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown.' is still the soundest piece of dereliction of paternal  responsibility I've come across).

Mr Wilberforce's Mulberries

I made clear my views on Mr Wilberforce political choices the other day, so putting that to one side here's a look at his choice of garden plants. You know how it is you have a small town house with a busy bustling river out the back and little space for a garden but you just have to  put a bit of green out there to lighten the mood, in modern parlance you want to create "an outdoor room" away from the hurly burly of getting filthy rich ... I suspect that Mr Wilberforce did not plant this or anything hereabouts since he lived in London for most of his adult life but let us, like good little tourists,  pretend, shall we? So a couple of small mulberries would be just dandy, hmmm  only now they're not small and, despite nursery rhymes, were never bushes. Whoever planted them Wilberforce House has two fine mulberry trees front and back that really fill the place and are quite spectacular. I wonder what the fruit tastes like, maybe go back later in the summer and find out ... if the birds and silkworms don't get them first.

The little brown sign warns the unwary visitor that the fruits from the tree may make the pavement slippy on a cold and frosty morning.

Mr Venn's Intersection with Hull

Here's the Drypool Bridge once more. Last time I posted about it I mentioned it was being redecorated in tasteful lime green and diarrhoea brown quasi camouflage colours which I'll spare you by posting a monochrome picture. As I mentioned (and as you can see) it was to be dedicated in some way to John Venn who left Hull before he was two and never came back ...but never mind that makes him or at the very least his meconium (which was quite possibly the inspiration for the colour scheme) and his delightful soiled nappies part of Hull and isn't it just great to breathe the very air of the place ... I'll stop now before I get carried away again (by the men in white coats). So anyhow, near this fine bridge, where {East Hull} ∩ {West Hull}, some crazy fools have made a nice blue plaque that I'm sure you'll all appreciate ...

Inevitable Alignment

Let me see now the church, St Mary's on Lowgate has been there since the 15^th century, Holy Trinity which is just peeking out from behind there has been bothering the almighty since the 13^th century; the domed law courts I'm guessing sometime in the 1990s, the entrance to the old Queen's Dock since 1775 or thereabouts and that crane (or scotch derrick crane) is hardly new. And I've been in or around Hull some 37 or so years ... so  sooner or later this alignment was bound to happen, wasn't it? The odd thing is that it didn't happen earlier when I posted this.


The weekend in black and white will align itself here at some time in the near future.

Gloriously sham shenanigans

Pride, as they used to say, goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall ... nowadays pride cometh round every year like hay fever. Corporations, councils, fire brigades, police forces, businesses, high and low profile individuals feel the need to show their wokeyness, their with-itity by basically succumbing to the blackmail of the latest fashion of the so-called progressives (who are really just wannabe thugs) and they end up bedaubing logos and telephone boxes or whatever comes to hand with this ridiculous rainbow cliché. No doubt there'll be yet another parade of mind numbing inanity. 

It is, of course just branding, a business like any other, pride mugs, pride knick-knacks and gee-gaws, but not Mother's Pride (though I'm sure they all are).  Fine, all is good in this free and liberated world .... But if, say, in this free and liberated world I choose not to buy the product, to show complete indifference to the fake garbage that it is, to see it all as  gloriously sham shenanigans will I be accused of being anti-gay,  of denying a small minority their rights? (Minorities, just in passing, do not have rights, individuals have rights. Once we let minorities have rights they'll be at odds with the majority and that will never do, the tail cannot wag the dog least not in a democracy). Now I'm sure I've met many gay  people, I would not know, I did not ask, I do not care. I'm absolutely sure that I have never met a rainbow coloured person in my life but then I lead a very sheltered existence.

Mr Wilberforce's Figs

"Mr Wilberforce is far from being a hypocrite, but he is we think, as fine as specimen of moral equivocation as can well be conceived"

                                                            William Hazlitt

Mr Wilberforce is celebrated in these parts by those who get some solace (and income no doubt) in spreading the word that, gosh and golly! the guy who "stopped the slave trade" came from these parts. You see it regularly used almost as a weapon, to defend, as if it needed it, the town of Hull from those who think it not the very heaven upon earth. So we get guff like this: "he devoted his life’s work to leading the abolition of slavery in the UK." a recent example from Twitter ( there was, of course no slavery in the UK, and the young excited student just displays ignorance in exuberance; a common trait these days ) ... that He, the sainted one, was born here though that ... that must MEAN something, mustn't it?

Folk who really should know better make pilgrimage to the palatial (for Hull) house on High Street. A whole industry has sprung up just because wee Willy (he weighed under 100lbs) was born to parents from Kingstown upon the good old river Hull. It is acceptable, indeed folk are intensely relaxed these days, to point out  that WW was filthy rich, so rich he bought  the Parliamentary seat of Kingston upon Hull, that was just the style in those times in England, the Mother of Parliaments. Having bought the one seat it was no trouble to buy the seat for Yorkshire some time later. Pecunia non olet ... He always claimed to be an independent member of Parliament but whenever Mr Pitt whistled his rich puppy Wilberforce came running adoringly to vote for some of the most oppressive legislation and abuse of human rights this country has ever seen and that is saying something. The Anglican Wilberforce, I won't call him a Christian that would insult too many decent people, the Anglican W. considered saving the souls of African slaves far above saving the lives of poor English working folk, they could have habeus corpus suspended, the right to association denied, the right to meet in gatherings of more than fifty denied, they could be chopped down by the yeomanry in Manchester, they could be transported to Tasmania for trade union activity, they could be tried and sentenced to death for seditious libel just for distributing pamphlets that they could not even read,  their children could be denied education and put to work by their equally uneducated parents. Mr W. would whine against the war with France but vote for all the supply measures and the burdensome, impoverishing taxation that was imposed on the English poor so as to kill the French poor; "Oh, In old England very hard times ..." As Hazlitt put it witheringly: "Mr. Wilberforce's humanity will go all lengths that it can with safety and discretion: but it is not to be supposed that it should lose him his seat for Yorkshire, the smile of Majesty, or the countenance of the loyal and pious. He is anxious to do all the good he can without hurting himself or his fair fame."
All this, though, is so much mud in the Humber for the Wilberforce fan club. The cant of the Clapham Sect was born here, on this street, this is his fig tree and these are his clay feet on a marble statue made fifty years after he died, he was here and that must surely MEAN that here is IMPORTANT and by extension Hull MEANS something and our lives in this small town in Yorkshire on the elbow of the Humber are just so much the better because of that ever elusive something ...

As far as the eye can see

I somehow ended up "by the tide of Humber" once again, so I thought I'd show some of the delights that can be spotted hereabouts. On a clear day you can just about make out a tiny bump on the horizon way away to the south-east that is the water tower of Grimsby dock, it's 200 feet tall and from this distance (15 miles, give or take) looks not unlike a mini-Nelson's column. This is one of those place's where you can check the curvature of the earth as tops of ships peek over the horizon, last time I looked the earth was still roundish ...

Off to the east and on the north bank is the village of Paull with its stumpy white lighthouse,

south has the oil refineries and chemical works of north Lincolnshire and the little red buoy that shows which way the current's running,

and off to the west the familiar Humber bridge, the beginnings of the Lincolnshire Wolds and the delightful cement works in the background,

while northwards lurk untold dangers.

Where it all went

I wonder how many places have to reassure themselves that they are a good place to be. Does ontological insecurity strike in the heart of London, Blackpool (hah! some chance!), York, or even fairest of the fair Portnablagh?  So why this reassuring message on Pier Street? I ask merely to be informed ... Let us pass on to other matters touristy.

Every now and then in this virtual scrapbook I get to show how things turned out. In this case some five or more years ago the place below was just an empty building awaiting rescue with an enigmatic message on the door that I never saw open. Later that year the edifice was covered  in scaffolding and shrouded in green. Now it's become The Store on Pier Street (there is only one store in case you might be wondering, indeed, with a good wind behind you, you could spit from one end of Pier Street to the other) and part of that Old Town/Humber Street renovation scene of  arty eateries, arty galleries and plain silly shops designed to attract those who like arty eateries, arty galleries and silly shops.  I believe folk of that nature come under the generic term of tourist. Please don't get  me wrong, I have in my time been a tourist, I know that may be difficult to believe but I have traipsed footsore and gawped manically and wearily around the tourist traps in London, Dublin, Paris, York and so many other "places of interest" and yes, Blackpool (don't knock it 'til you've tried it) and come away poorer and none the wiser like so many before and since. Tourists to Hull are most welcome and they are more than welcome to Humber Street; in fact if they really like it they can take it away when they leave.

Whispering sweet nothings

I posted about this delightful surreal carving in Pearson Park before showing the thing being carved and to be honest I thought I'd posted about it again to show the completed work but you know what thought did ... so to put things right here's a few more images. While taking these pictures a man rode by on a bike and clearly he hadn't noticed this before and he nearly fell off craning his neck round  and gaping in disbelief ...

I recall the artist telling me that he was trying to make the figures a bit more child friendly and less scary towards the ground which appealed to Margot who took this picture.

The weekend in Black and White is here.

Dreggsgate

So tell me, for my ignorance is immense, how do civilised places deal with increasing anti-social behaviour? Do they not call in the police to deal with it? Employ some security staff to eject malfeasant scum? Maintain a presence of authority to let them know who's in charge? Or ... Do they lock the doors and hide in their office like timorous mice? Abjectly surrender to the guilty, criminal few at the expense of the innocent majority? 

I ask because never in my few years on this earth have I seen such pathetic cowardly actions as those carried out recently in Hull Paragon Station. The gates you see above will be closed to all and sundry between 9.30 and 16.30 to reduce crime .... It is so reassuring that criminal types keep such a workaday schedule, they probably sing that Dolly Parton earworm as they go about their nefarious dealings ... Station manager Dan Dreggs (I'm not making this up) has placed notices up explaining that it's really British Transport Police's plan ...but it's his name on the notices and he is responsible for this act of stupidity.

The whole thing would be laughable if it did not have repercussions on those who absolutely must use this gate, they are told they should book ahead to get admission. But many did not know and so could not, neither can a good few even read the sign because disability comes in many forms and the Dreggs of this world are just way out of their depths ... did I mention that taxis drop off their fares outside this gate? That the main car park for the station is outside this gate? So both fit and frail must both make their way right around the front of the station and enter via Ferensway just because a few miscreant nobodies have ruined the peace of Mr Dreggs and he simply cannot cope (between the hours of 9.30 and 16.30!)... oh yes, this was until a fortnight ago signed as a fire exit ...

A petition has been running since this idiocy began you can sign it here should you be outraged by this nonsense.

A great many are of the opinion that this action is contrary to disability discrimination legislation; I feel it may well be so.

So it's probably my fault that ...

If you have a super-duper memory you will recall seeing the self-same store way back in 2012. Back then the threat was of redevelopment, I cannot for the life of me recall what redevelopment was threatened other than that it had been put on hold ... permanently it now seems.

Now the name above the door says House of Fraser but to me this is Binns  as Binns it was when I first came to Hull. (I'm a Binns boy , there was a Binns in Hartlepool from whence cometh I and as a very, very bored child I was dragged round Binns so...bloody Binns it is, OK?) To real Hull folk this is, of course, Hammonds (v 2.0 the rather fine classical original was destroyed in the last European/Worldwide ding dong). Whatever you call it I  haven't bought anything here since they stopped selling the coffee I liked (back when I used to drink coffee) last century.

So it's probably my fault that ... this place is closing down soon which will add to the number of empty shops in the town centre. Or it would if the Council actually reported empty units properly instead of devising a cunning plan to mislead folk as to the true situation. I won't bore you with the details; it's the usual trick of counting what you want to count and then claiming things are just dandy. You know the drill by now.

Blue tent blues

What care I for a goose-feather bed? 

With the sheet turned down so bravely, O! 

For to-night I shall sleep in a cold open field. 

Along with the raggle taggle gypsies O!...

Not quite the cold open field but the tarmac under Myton Bridge can hardly be the most comfortable place in town either. You'll find homeless rough sleepers in many towns in the UK these days I guess. In Hull, at the last count (that I can find)  in autumn last year some 26 people were found to be sleeping out on the  streets, not all by any means in tents like these. Homelessness is a huge problem these days, mostly hidden it has to be said (sofa surfing, staying with parents and so on), rough sleepers being the most visible tip of this societal ice berg if I may use a much clichéd metaphor. This country is said to need three million new homes and it needed them, like, yesterday... At the present rate of building most of the homeless will be long dead and maybe... maybe that's the plan.

Other folk at City Daily Photo will hopefully have happier posts, at this month's Blue themed event. 

A road by any other name ...

You know how towns like to honour folk by naming streets after them: so this town has a Larkin Close; an appropriately dull cul-de-sac, Alfred Gelder Street, Jameson Street, and Ferensway , of course; that local turncoat John Hotham from the civil war times gets a road along with Sir Thomas, Lord Fairfax who gets an avenue; there must be dozens more: Raich Carter Way, Blundell's Corner spring to mind as I write... just outside Hull, across the road from me, there's a short avenue named after a guy who wanted to be Lord Glencoe but somehow the connotations of bloody massacre made him change to Lord Strathcona ... so, anyway,  the other year they decided to rename Garrison Road as Roger Millward Way. I'm not sure that this is any kind of honour since Garrison Road as was is really just an extension of the dreaded A63/Castle Street, the bane of motorists' lives and a right pain in the nethers to cross at times... and I wonder how many even know about this or whether the name will catch on ... when they finally get home, will the motorists of this fair town put their feet up, wrap their hands round a well deserved hot brew and say "oh that *beeeep* traffic on Roger Millward Way was such a *beeeep* disgrace" ... nah not going to happen, ever.
I won't pretend to know anything about who or what Roger Millward was, some sporty bloke, so I've heard,  rugby league, really, really not my scene ...

I mentioned today and several times before that this road is  a pain to cross and that young men have been seen to turn into grey beard loons waiting, funeral directors have been spotted lurking for falling stock ... well some concerned person has put up a plaque to let the world know that those who wait may be gone but are not forgotten, not lost just gone before ...

It's a kind of madness

I suppose my favourite view of Hull is one where I can't see it all, out across the Humber, where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet as some baldy bloke once wrote so many years ago. I was gazing across the wondrous brown ooze the other day when I spied out to the east something on the horizon that was new to me, so pushing the camera's zoomy potential to the limit I took a picture with no hope of it showing anything much. When I got home and looked at the hazy image above I thought what on earth is that ... turns out it's the biomass storage silos at Immingham docks some nine miles away as the seagull flies. It's all part of the current vogue for saving the world by  burning trees to make electricity. Instead of digging up coal from under the ground in Yorkshire (like they did for centuries) they now import wood (9 million tons per year) from across the world (America and China) in very large oil burning ships that dock at Immingham, discharge their biomass into these silos from whence it's taken by oil burning train to the Drax power station, in Yorkshire. I'm sure this salves the conscience of those who worry about the amount of atmospheric CO₂ produced by mankind (estimated at ~5%) compared to that produced by "nature" (~95%). I'm also sure they do not worry that burning wood makes more CO₂ per KW of electricity generated (50-85% more than coal and nearly 300% more than gas!) as wood burns less efficiently than coal (which is why our ancestors went to the trouble of digging out coal in the first place). Acres of forest are chopped down daily to turn on the lights in Yorkshire and hereabouts; it takes a mere fifty years for it to regrow. I've read that  4,600 square miles of forest are needed for this one power station alone, I find that an absolutely staggering figure if true. Chopping down young trees grown for this madness seemingly releases lots of  CO₂ from the forest which takes years to be reabsorbed by new growth, so harvesting biomass process actually increases atmospheric CO₂. 
This is , of course, not cheap, it is much more expensive to produce sparks this way than by traditional coal burning so we find biomass burning plants are closing all across the world, they simply can't compete. However Government policy (made law this week without any discussion or vote in Parliament but simply by ministerial decree, so much for democracy) is to increase the price of energy for everyone, sorry,  I should say to reduce emissions and make the UK Carbon neutral by 2050 (whatever that means) ...  It is obvious that burning biomass is far from being a sustainable, renewable, "carbon neutral" process . But there you go; the greeny squeaky wokey folk and HM Government will have it that there is a problem with our atmosphere and that this is a solution; they are, of course, all completely mad.

Holy Mackerel

It's been a while since I posted anything piscine related to the Hull Fish Trail. To rectify that omission and as it's Friday here's part of a small shoal of mackerel lurking for a passing sprat no doubt. You can find them at the eastern end of Holy Trinity church where Lowgate turns imperceptibly into Market Place. They're carved out of sandstone and have been in the pavement and walked over by the passing throng since 1992 or thereabouts and are getting a bit worn out and easily missed.

The Weekend in Black and White is here.

“Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?”

A few years ago I noticed that the two elm trees on Nelson Street were going a bit patchy in the foliage ... oh no, I thought at the time, not the dreaded Dutch Elm Disease again ... still hope for the best I said to myself with no real expectation ... so it came as no great shock or surprise to find that they've recently been removed. Just two more casualties in the long running decimation of millions of these trees across this country and indeed the world.

Here's one of the beautiful beasts back in 2016 just starting to show signs of distress recorded, as it were, for posterity.

Elms produce hundreds of thousands of these 'seeds' every year from what I heard and read not one of them is fertile ... all English Elms are genetically identical clones (brought here by the Romans along with rabbits and pheasants, gratias vobis ago), which doesn't help things if you are looking for a disease resistant variety.

OK I admit I enlarged and fiddled with contrast on this to see how many rings I could count; somewhere around 170 was my best guess which puts our young elm here around 1850ish which would fit in nicely with the opening of the Corporation Pier for the ferry to Lincolnshire.

Where there's muck ...

I'm much too young to have any knowledge of the great smogs of London but I am old enough to remember when each house in the land burnt coal and the fuss and bother of the clean air legislation that meant we had to change to smokeless fuels: coke at first (which was a bit like having a mini blast furnace in the living room) and then later converting to good old North Sea Gas. I think all towns and cities in the in the UK are now smokeless zones however East Riding of Yorkshire has no smokeless zones at all so in Cottingham there are still the odd one or two coal burning houses pumping out the vile reeking smoke. It's amazing the intolerable, acrid, throat stinging stench from one coal fire and yet I don't recall this from thousands of coal hearths when I was a young lad; that was just how things were then. So no, I don't miss the old ways, the days starting cold and freezing as the fire obviously had gone out over night and wouldn't "catch" unless a sheet of newspaper was held over it to pull a draught up the chimney, the ashes needing carrying out, the regular delivery from the coal merchants, the sweeping of the chimney every so often to stop it catching fire (that was fun though, for a young'un, watching the brush poke out of the chimney with a cloud of soot), really cold bedrooms with ice on the window in winter, no central heating, no double glazing, no instant hot water, the singular joy of a frozen toilet and so on... I'm feeling a cold shudder just writing about it (but that could be because it's only 14C outside) ... give me a nice, efficient, clean gas boiler with instant central heating any day. But I digress ...

It was not just the bronchi of every living soul that were covered in a patina of soot and tar but the buildings were coated in grime, some with centuries of soot, as well. You might imagine that after nigh on fifty years of clean air these buildings would all be sparkling and for the most part you'd be right but ... well there's always one isn't there? This reminder of how things used to be is 46 Whitefriargate. It was originally a bank built in 1904 and despite, or maybe because of, its sooty grime it is Grade 2 listed. Now imagine, if you can, every building in every town similarly coated, ... no wonder old films were black and white ...

Well, you know what thought did?

...Followed a muck cart and thought it was a wedding.

I seemed to have timed my arrival in town on Saturday for the ceremony of the emptying of bins, an event designed to draw in crowds and reassure folk that the City of Culture will not be overwhelmed by litter. So it was that I followed this muck cart , sorry, stately urban refuge collection and recycling vehicle, up the sunny delight that is Jameson Street where it posed  in front of the now empty BHS store, an almost iconic Hull combination.

À propos  the empty store the council , last I heard, had asked for tenders and plans for demolition. Whether those plans have to include keeping the mural I  know not; the council has said it is its intention to keep it. I won't tell you what I'm thinking because you know what thought did ...

"Your patience and cooperation is appreciated."

"This is your decision. The government will implement what you decide."

                                                                                        Her Majesty's Government

Leather, I read, is the appropriate gift for a three year anniversary and a good strong leather tawsing would sort out our dozy elected representatives fine and good. Three years of prevarication, horse trading, Parliamentary shenanigans that I've never seen the like of before and still somehow, to no-one's real surprise, the UK is still in the EU. The record from the illiberal, antidemocratic Remainers is stuck, "Leaving without a deal" would be a catastrophe, the world would stop spinning and the sky fall in ...but of course there is no deal that they could accept not even the watered garbage offered by Mrs May. The record of our so-called "Brexit means Brexit" government is one of supine surrender to the stubborn mules of the EU. So the delay saw the farce of this country participating in the EU Parliamentary elections where the Bexit Party, a mere couple of months in the making, got twice as many votes as the next two parties put together. (Somehow this was seen as a tremendous victory for the Liberal Democrats who, it goes without saying, are neither liberal nor democratic.) 

Now two Prime Ministers have been consumed by Brexit and a third is about to be chosen in an arcane process involving only members of the Conservative and Unionist Party. This appears to be accompanied by  merry and bloody hatchet jobs in all the media on the leading contender's private life, make stuff up, report scurrilous lies, you name it, it's open season on Boris Johnson (I could almost feel sorry for the overweight old Etonian sybarite, almost...) He just so happens to 'promise' to leave the EU, come what may, on October 31; ah promises, promises ...

The other guy, Jeremy Hunt, or Mrs May in trousers, campaigned to remain in the EU and now mealy mouths vaguely about leaving, hints at a second referendum (by all means bring it on!) and has a surname that is often the subject of Freudian slips ...

Three years ago today the people of this country, participating in the largest democratic exercise in the history of this country, voted by a clear majority to leave the EU. The government said, in a pamphlet delivered to every house in the land, "This is your decision. The government will implement what you decide." So, as the old song says, "Why are we waiting? Why, why, oh why?".


A Pedant's PS shouldn't that be "Your patience and cooperation are appreciated." ?