The Adventure of the Autumn Abstraction

In which I reflect on things...

Hello, I hope you are well. October half term has arrived and I'm excited to have my first proper Autumnal holiday in my flat. I often find that the start of the holidays for me are a time I can slow down and reflect on things so that's really what this post is about- abstraction is the "state of being lost in thought"

This time last year I had the dreaded Covid a year on I can reflect that it was one of the very worst weeks of my life. It definitely changed me in some ways, not least with the fact I haven't spent a day just sat in my flat since because I can't face that cabin fever ever again. I've also tried to avoid the isolation I left and have reconnected with old friends and regularly attended social events in a way I haven't done many years. 

I'm somehow already 25% of the way through my teaching course. Whilst I'm still ultra-cautious about what lies ahead, I'm amazed at just how brilliantly things have gone. I would never have dreamed to receive feedback as overwhelmingly positive I have received. There's definitely been a feeling of imposter syndrome as I struggle to balance my usual low self-esteem with the feedback I've been getting. Having had such vicious and unpleasant feedback in the past this positivity has been overwhelming and there has definitely been a secret tear or two that I have wiped away before anyone noticed! On the whole I feel really pleased with myself and my self-confidence has reached a level it hasn't been in at in over ten years. 

I've now been a vegetarian for a few months and it feels like something that's not ingrained. There's been the odd moment where I've been lurking around the sandwiches in Tesco and admired a coronation chicken sandwich or looked enviously at an image of a meat-feast pizza but I've not succumbed. At home it's proved really easy. There have been times when I've eaten out that is has proved more challenging, not least the unpleasant vegetarian curry I was forced to have when attending a quiz night, but anywhere with a decent selection of food seems to have a good number of vegetarian options. Someone asked me if I felt better since becoming vegetarian which was something I'd not really thought about before. I realised that I do and I've certainly had more energy than I used to which is just as well given how hard I've been working. 

As I write we're a few days away from our fourth Prime Minister of the year. Liz Truss turned up, ruined the economy and put in legislation to destroy our nature before the Conservative party realised just how useless she was and sent her packing. While she has made everyone's financial situation even tougher than it already was she can happily claim £115,000 a year for six weeks work. It's a tough time to be British and you can almost hear the collective laughter of the global community on the wind. As ever though we've held up our sense of humour with a livestream of a wet lettuce that did indeed last longer than the Prime Minister. A caller on Radio 4 summed up the situation by describing Truss as "all fart and no shit".

It's uncertain who will come next but it's difficult not to imagine more chaos to come. There's talk that Boris Johnson is going to try to reclaim the job which would be an utterly insane decision from the Conservative Party. As someone on Twitter put it, it would be like crashing your car terribly in July and deciding it still has a perfectly decent mandate so driving it off without repairs. Given that in a matter of weeks Johnson will face an investigation about misleading parliament over Partygate it's entirely possible that he could be in and out of the job very quickly. 

The most likely contender right now is former chancellor Rishi Sunak who is largely responsible for the state of the economy right now and is so rich he has no concept of what life is like for normal people. The other contender appears to be Leader of the Commons Penny Mourdant who no-one really knows anything about so at least it would be a surprise to find out in which way she is incompetent. 

Being in government is surely the only job where you can spend all your time arguing with your colleagues and trying to take charge without getting any work done whatsoever and not get fired. They've done very little actual work on running the country in a time of a cost of living crisis since the Spring. I generally feel that no party should be in government for much more than ten years and we've had the Conservatives since 2010. It seems incredibly unlikely that no matter who ends up being Prime Minister that the government will actually be able to run effectively after this year and we're due even more instability and incompetence. We've never needed a general election more than we do right now.

In summary: personally things are great, nationally things are shit. Thanks for reading my nonsense, see you soon.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventure of the Great Reset

Image
In which I reflect and regroup... I am not going to lie, 2024 has been tough so far. You begin a year with such high hopes and sometimes the year decides to take those high hopes and crush them in the most brutal way.  I'm currently enjoying the tranquility of the summer holidays and a rest that has perhaps never felt quite so well-earned. Perhaps the best piece of advice I was given during the many training sessions I have had over the last few years is to make the most of the resets in your life. That might be small resets, as small as a few seconds in the middle of the day or they might be bigger resets like six weeks off work.  Part of this reset has been getting outside. The year so far has not been helped by the endless miserable weather. We always like to joke in the UK that it rains a lot but this year has taken that to the next level. We often think of climate change as meaning we will get hotter weather but it just means that the weather will change and will get more...
Read more

Best Picture 2024

Image
The 2024 Oscars ceremony is mere hours away and I've finally finished writing my annual post about this year's Best Picture nominees. This is my sixth year doing this and once again I've seen all the nominees. Let's take a look! American Fiction Thelonius 'Monk' Ellison, played by Jeffrey Wright who is perhaps best known as Felix Leiter in the Daniel Craig Bond films, is an intelligent African-American professor and writer whose high-brow books sell poorly. Frustrated, he writes a satire of "black" books which is unexpectedly taken by the publishing world to be a serious piece of literature. It's a hilarious film with Wright having lots of fun taking on Monk's alter-ego. At the same time though it's also a clever critique of the sort of media that is consumed by white people to make them feel better about racial issues and the film points out that black people can have normal lives beyond ghettos and gangs- the film itself also tells an ord...
Read more

1000 Miles

Image
Famous Scottish duo The Proclaimers once sang the words "I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more just to be the man who walks a thousand miles to fall down at your door". These lyrics are now part of my plan for 2019. Well, the falling down bit isn't part of the plan but with dyspraxia the likelihood of falling down at someone's door during the next twelve months is not out of the question. I have never tended to set traditional resolutions but I do love a challenge. # walk1000miles is a big challenge run by Country Walking  magazine. The rules are fairly flexible but the idea is simply to walk 1000 miles in a calendar year. 1000 miles is about the distance between the UK and Poland. Now I actually do a fair amount of walking and have hit my 10,000 daily step target every day for nearly three years now. Walking a total of 1000 miles would probably not be a huge challenge if I counted every bit of walking I did, including the many miles of chasing chi...
Read more