The full force of the life choice the Great British voters have made is dawning over a wounded & strangely muted Country. Peasants are not waving pitchforks & Hayricks are not actually burning.

Although we got close in Bristol last week when an anti-police bill protest went sour. It is all beginning to vaguely smack of 1930’s Nazi Germany where a populist Government of fringe Circus Clowns gradually became more sinister until the inevitable political grotesque played itself out in such terrible fashion… It couldn’t happen here? Could it?

The Great Unwashed British public are taking huge pleasure & satisfaction in the EU satraps tripping over their own coat-tails trying to get the bat-flu antidote rolled out across the Continent. They are making an awful mess, but I can’t help feeling we are behaving like the passengers on the high side of a ship that is sinking. Congratulating ourselves on being dry, without realizing we’re all in the same fix. Sooner or later it will dawn on the more cognizant that the market that fills half the shelves in our shops and provides most of our sun-beds in the Med is still shut and that will do us no good at all even if we get let out of school first! If we have no one to play with – what is the point?

It’s hard not to be pessimistic in these uncertain times, all public life in turmoil and no discernable traits of a plan from our leaders – whatever their stripe.

These bleak prospects compel me to reach for the hair shirt although I know itchy beige won’t help. Through all the noise & cant I have a moment of revelation that we all could be living better, more fulfilled and helpful lives, but we are caught in this terrible danse macabre by the Society that brought us up & the ultimate need for constant change while ferverently hoping everything stays as it was in an imagined halcyon past!

This flash of insight opens a dark road to travel – the life we could have lived… Any more of this soul searching and I shall have to go into retreat and find a religion that suits my current temprament – Welsh Chapel should cover it.

My Grandmother was Welsh chapel, it bred a lifelong inclination towards Baptist teachings in my mother & an aversion to all forms of Religious observance in her Grandson – except for the occassional Hymn singing. Doris – my Grandmother – eventually quit the congregation as the local vicar frowned on Women wearing make-up, a femine right she was not prepared to conceed even at the cost of her immortal soul. I wonder whether she regrets that decision now?

On the current affairs front Pitt-Quickly reliably informs me that no one in Business or Finance has the first clue what is going on. Between Brexit, Covid & some outrageous posturing from all concerned, any ‘safe heavens’ for my filthy lucre and future material well-being are all on a storm-tossed Ocean.

Bunter & the Fourth Form & Van der Hosen & her political Goblins are all trying to blame each other for any political or economic issue the press get wind of, which fires up the fringes on all sides to demand more shooting of our own feet.

And on the domestic front Mitzi goes from strength to strength in her grasp of the on-line World we all now inhabit for society. From telephone sex to knitting socks for Soldiers at the front, she belongs to a virtual forum on any given subject. From dawn until dusk she is chattering away in the back room to people she hasn’t been formally introduced to about the intricacies of yoghurt weaving, basket casing & level 2 car mechanics. It is a wonder to behold how much information, custom and practice is being shared across the Internet. However from what I have (distantly) observed, most of it is in the form of gossip, playground inneuendo, and disarmed polemic. Even in the time of Social Distancing it seems leaning over the Garden Fence to talk about the neighbours is still the occupation of choice for the most virtually socially literate amongst us!

I have just got off the Videophone with my cohorts Borke, Swine, Astral-Martin & Pitt-Quicker, the news from all fronts is not good.

Pitt-Quicker – the man who literally broke the bank at Monte-Carlo in 2008 & then sold it poverty insurance – is a deeply worried man. And when he frets we sweat. Fire, Plague & Pestilience are just opportunities as far as he is concerned to go long or short in the markets. But the current state of affairs has him rattled.

Apparently it’s not because he’s losing money. On the contrary he is coining it in faster than you can say ‘New Ferrari please’. The worrying aspect for all right thinking people is: He doesn’t know exactly where all this dosh is coming from and more importantly – where it’s going! For a man who knows the inner workings of the market with Newtonian precsion his current perplexity is astonishing. According to his gospel: bat-flu, Brexit, Trumpery, unemployment, factories idleness, empty planes, Governments cooking books and all related icebergs should have the markets & the economy holed below the waterline, but instead the whole issue seems to be rising faster than Lazurus on a Sunday. Individual stories can be woven of swings & roundabouts, but taken in the round the economic ship should be sinking with all hands, but here all the dosh dealers are, partying like it’s 1999…

Normally he is the first to know how the magic is done, what’s behind the curtain and how to make a turn. But for the first time in his professional, money-grabbing life he has no idea how long this flush will run and what to do about it.

Astral-Martin tells the same sort of story from the World of heavy machinery. They are bound up in red tape & empty containers, but still the balance sheets won’t fall off a cliff.

Borke our resident boffin & Swinefever of technical bent say in their Worlds it’s boom time for brains, which is slightly more explicable given the need for Science to think its way out of our current predicament, but who is ultimately paying for it all?

The short answer of course is Bunter & the Fourth Form, and like minded international circus’s, but since we all know they cannot organize a whiskey challenge in a distillery, the taps will have to be turned off at some point & there will be no strategy for a soft landing or what happens next, so sooner or later it will be Ka-boom baby! as Mitzi would say just before the money shot!

That being the case, why are the markets defying gravity & climbing higher just to make the eventual fall bigger? And most importantly for my limited buried family silver, when should we bail out? Too soon and we risk missing out, & too late and it’s pulling pieces out of the wreckage…

It all may seem like First World problems but that’s all we are good at solving & we have to keep our own particular Wolves from the door. Besides everyone gets wet if the ship goes down, and most passengers will drown.

On the whole this group has been anti Europe. Mostly because they hate the French & anyone foreign telling them what to do. They all saw the glint of Gold in an EU free rule-book, closer ties to the U.S. wallet, Far Eastern markets on the make & were rubbing their hands ready to roll the dice. But leaving aside the mountain of paper-work that now has to be climbed, resigning as a European super-power doesn’t seem to be as great an opportunity as it did four years ago in a World where bat-flu roams free & all the made up Global money is going to keep the ships afloat instead of building new shiny expensive projects to line all free-thinking lead-pipe capitalists pockets.

It makes for a Nation where the wealth creators I know are keen to hedge their bets – but are not sure how. Old remedies may not work anymore & the thought of an underfunded lazy, English Middle-Class is too much to bear. I am going for an early lunch with a big bottle. So much for virtual companionship!

For once the half-arsed approach Boris Bunter & the Fourth Form take to everything they touch seems to be paying off. Having realized they hadn’t put enough of any particular make of bat-flu fixant on the shopping list for 120 million doses – presumably because they were hedging their bets & our currency – and not having the volumes of any one product to give the voters 2 shots, they went for broke & decided to ignore the boffins and dole out only 1 shot each in the short term.

I know they were between a rock & a hard head in this circumstance, but it’s the way they skulk around decisions, pretending they know what they are doing & that it’s all down to British exceptionalism that is so embarassing. Everyone knows the buggers muddle is largely due to incompetence in the fourth form dorm and piss-poor planning, but some pretend otherwise, some blame the twice cursed foreigners and the rest of us just raise our eye-brows and reach for Dr Gordon’s electric soup and vent our spleen on Twatter.

So far whenever the leadership have got ahead of, or diverged from, the egg-heads prognosts the science and maths usually run them over. But not – it seems – this time. Those who know have been gazing into the test tubes and have announced that a 1 shot jab is making a difference. Hoo-bloody-ray for our side.

The remove have also doubled this up with just enough signed orders for different fixatives to keep the whole ball rolling having handed the detail over to the Army & NHS to get it done. It’s bloody refreshing to see professionals delivering on a ‘shot in the dark’ policy for once. They owe some of this good fortune to an old City sparring partner of mine in the Private Money World – Cat Bingham – who might be a 24 Carat lead pipe Capitalist, but she knows her way around a test tube having trained as a boffin at Oxford and was a shrewd appointment from Bunter who normally only knows how to put a square-peg in a round hole.

Cat would be in line for a statue now – along with dear old Major Tom – if she hadn’t been caught trying to tip some public cash into her cousin’s-husband’s-nephew’s PR company. But once a hood always a hood as my old probation master used to say!

The Treble then came up for Boris with our neighbours across the Channel making a complete Horlicks of their own Bat glue plans. I don’t know if it’s Boris & the Remove bringing everyone down to their level, but Von Leider-hosen and her inner circle got caught short by the speed of the vaccine release and a gerbil dying at the glue factory to threaten EU supplies of the stuff. To cover their panic the muscles from Brussels then set about hi-jacking some British supplies & drowning the whole thing in paperwork, just in case the Eurotrash weren’t as forgiving as the British of their Government cock-ups and voted with their Molotov Cocktails (mine’s a large one comrade!).

If ever the soft red taped under-belly of EU intransigence was exposed to a raw British public still shell-shocked by Brexit, this was the moment. The real crime here is that it made our Government & the Brexit farce look sane. No mean feat for an organization that prides itself on common sense & good filing!

For once economies of scale didn’t work & it’s made British Sovereignty look like it’s won an award, while deflecting from all the other issues like Irish borders, empty shelves & the UK’s worse economic performance in Europe since I spent my tuck money in the first week of the Christmas half because I thought buying everyone in class a Jamboree bag would make me popular!

Bunter & the Form were strangely reluctant to crow over the EU mess & he was almost diplomatic in his handling of the affair. Which just goes to show how badly he ‘s cocked up elsewhere – presumably over the imaginary Irish border – and needs Von Leider-Hosen, Barmier et al to bail him out!

But at least he maybe learning to link cause & effect to different issues, rather than make outrageous claims, get caught, bluster & then get very, very, very drunk. Maybe the Owl of the Remove is growing up a bit. But in any event he is still Bunter!

I am reminded in these uncertain times of my old English teacher who revelled in the name Runciman Wilberforce Ackerly and had the character to match.

In his tatty graduating robes and motarboard hat he would flounce into our ancient wooden panelled classroom that smelled of long dead ink, forgotten texts & previous inmates sweat, smash whatever hardback covered book he was carrying on the teacher’s desk and in the ensuing frozen silence sweep his piercing gaze around the room of school-boy statues and bark out a line of poetry.

‘Things fall apart; the Centre cannot hold!’

His gaze would continue it’s piercing search until it settled on reluctant prey. He would then suddenly point at the subject like the accuser on judgement day.

‘You… there. Bulk is it? What did Yeats decide in the end was his following line?’

Silence would fall. The victim terrified that the burden of the question had fallen on him. The other 20 or so inmates not daring to breathe a sigh of relief at having escaped the judgement of poetry on this occassion.

Anything but the correct answer would result in a board rubber and carcinogenic levels of chalk received at maximum velocity straight to the forehead. Often blood would ensue.

This experience taught me 2 valuable lessons. The first was that only Corporal Punishment levels of education practice would force knowledge into my brain & as a result the second lesson was that I learned – and still retain – a lot of 19th & early 20th Century poetry in the vacant lumber room of my mind.

So here and now in the ‘roaring’ twenty-first Century as I survey the horrible mess the Country & its people have got themselves into, those lines drummed into me by old ‘RW’ keep rolling around in my brain as I pick up a newspaper, open a computer screen or turn on the wireless to hunt for the Test Match.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

…And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Wise words from an Irishman who knew a thing or two about hopeless causes.

I cannot believe what is happening. It won’t sink in. Probably because no one has hit me with a board rubber lately.

In the middle of an ever worsening health crisis that has been with us now for over a year, we tear up our best trading agreements, replace them with a half-arsed ersatz model that moves all the benefits to our neighbours, nearly wreck the whole thing over a dying food industry, all in the name of creating a lot more paperwork, costs, & confusion & badging the resulting mess ‘Sovereignty’ of all things. None of which would matter I guess if Boris Bunter & the Remove had the least idea what to do with it now we have it!

It turns out the 4th Form’s ideas cupboard is bare & they are now wandering around the World & tapping up our indigenous moneybags with a suggestion box asking for policies on what to do next. The rest of the World still can’t work out if we are insane or just playing a bad joke on everyone.

I am reminded of another old mentor William William, a leery old cove who didn’t spend too much time in real World, worked in the City because his minted father got him a job there and shed the contents of the family trust fund like it was diseased. He once dragged me along to an antiques auction in his home village out in the Suffolk marshes. He bid a small King’s ransom for some sort of silver clock contraption in a spirited bidding war and seemed damned pleased with his victory when he finally won out. I asked him what it was for. He said:

I have no idea what it does, but half the people in the room seemed to want it, it looks impressive and the battle made the Victory sweet.

He put it on the mantelpiece when he got home in the ‘Great Room’, admired it for a while, ignored it after a few days & when his Children came to sell it to pay the death duties it turned out to be worthless.

Illic Vadit Brexit!

The plague is making a comeback and our head clown is tightening the screws again on who, when & where we can catch the blight.

I have watched with increasing horror the mounting ineptitude of our leaders in almost every sphere of endeavour they undertake. I am watching an unfolding farce with no resolution and with each new blow I feel the weight of my generation’s failure to lead our times with any degree of competence.

If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then Slough grammar and its peers are where the battle of Brexit and modern leadership was lost.

When I went to a certain minor public school of modest accomplishment, there were various tenets of conduct & behaviour that were drummed into us from the very air we breathed. They were largely unspoken but they revolved around an assumption that your peers were honest, decent, true & stood for everything that made the British gentlemen superior to all other forms of upper-classishness.

We learned our history from gung-ho boy’s comic books & acquired our sense of entitlement from 500 years of in-breeding, but the point was we were the best of the best and had a paternatalistic rightness about our cause & our actions that made us superior and fit for leadership. Our word was our bond and we would make the World – if not a better place – a better place for Britons. Or so we believed.

It struck me even at school that our class behaviour did not always match the ideals we inherited, but it was ‘bad form’ to point out other peers weaknesses, or acknowledge your own short-comings because this let the side down, and a few back-sliders were tolerated to maintain the dignity & integritity of the whole structure.

When I went to work in the City in the late 1970’s to gain all the benefits I had been taught to expect from my background & education, I found very quickly that I had to turn a blind eye to all the transgressions, from all sides, to our unwritten code of conduct.

‘A Gentlemen’s word is his bond’, ‘Utmost good faith’ ‘Always truth’ were phrases I heard quoted frequently by people who were doing the exact opposite on a daily basis. I began to realize with mounting horror that the whole system ran on hypocrisy and if everyone started dealing with the reality of the situation, the whole system would collapse.

But it wasn’t just dishonesty that was underpining the system, it was incompetence and wilful blindness as well. And this shallow, hollow system nearly went to the wall in the ’90’s as the City’s financial services was submerged by a sea of incompetence, obsolesence, greed, dishonesty & ignorance and most importantly of all a lack of regulation caused by a class who didn’t apparently need it because they were ‘Gentlemen’.

And the ‘Gentlemen players’ were already being overtaken by a new breed of more competent, professional, QUALIFIED, leaders who implemented the regulations and controls needed to keep the whole City of London afloat. Although this new breed of ‘barrow boys’, bean-counters, pony-tails & MBA’s had their own flaws and I’m not certain much has really changed if someone competent looks really hard under the lid. It’s just harder to get a decent lunch nowadays but the greedy hypocrisy is still there in gold-plated buckets.

Which brings me back to Bojo the clown. There he sits at the top of the tree. Privileged, entitled, incompetent, expecting whatever tosh he comes out with to be believed because he comes from a World where his word is his bond and it’s bad form to point out he’s welched on his debts. That won’t stop the bookies coming ’round and breaking his legs, but in Boris’ World it’s the bookie’s fault for not respecting a Gentlemen, not his fault for not paying his debts.

So the only questions that matter are: does Bojo believe the old tosh he comes out with or does he know he is lying and expect his privileged position to protect him from reality? And does the man in the street who put him in Number 10 know or care whether Boris is lying or not?

Because if the answer is his voters know Boris Johnson is lying and believe he is a ‘Gentlemen’ and that excuses him, then Democracy is not working and the lunatics really have taken over the asylum, and we gave them the keys.

My dark mood has been laid even further low and up until today I didn’t think that was possible. Pitt-Quicker has been on the all-seeing telephone to say that the great Brexit cash-in is in danger of going the same way as free school milk and one of my racing certanities in the 2:30 at Haydock Park.

It appears that the great masterplan – known only to a select few – of turning a massive profit from other people’s Brexit misfortunes lies in tatters as once again Bojo’s troop of clowns fluff their lines and miss their cues with breath-taking incompetence.

The plan was a simple one. Keep the World’s tradesmen on tenter-hooks for a new UK deal until the 11th hour, watch the whole lot begin to fall off a cliff and just when the Investors in the street are tearing their collective hair out – Government appointed magicians pull several rabbits out of the hat in the form of binding Trade deals with rich customers and those in the know cash in their buy now – pay later convertibles and spend the rest of the year counting their winnings. Simple as that. Nothing complicated. Shorting the markets is a time honoured British tradition and if the great unwashed voters want to walk away from the EU land of milk & honey, then who are we City Types to deny ourselves a bit of compensation on the side?

Bojo went along with it because it keeps his mates happy and lines his own pockets so it seemed to be all systems go. All he had to do was wind the Trade officials up and tell them to keep talking in the various negiotiations until the adults arrive on December 31st and make it all work!

But it turms out that oaf Frost and Truss the Queen of Cheese are really ballsing it up. Instead of sitting down & talking about the weather for 10 months, they have actually been negotiating and trying to make some real headway! The direct result has been some very pissed off foreigners and worse – the press taking sides! Anyone looking too closely at this whole issue is the last thing we need.

Pitt-Quickly thinks at this rate there won’t be any hats to pull rabbits out of come New Year’s Eve. And given our leader’s track record over the last 6 months we are not optimistic there is any likelyhood of even this simple fix coming off.

What has got P-Q particularly rattled is that if this plan goes up the trees, our new found Russian friends are going to be massively put out – especially as they have put most of the stake in to bring this about. Apparently they don’t take kindly to losing their shirts to incompetent clowns and have been known to settle scores by sending around a case of arsenic and old lace to anyone they think has crossed them as Alex Navalny could testify – if he ever wakes up.

So my top-up pension plan is under severe threat, and just when I seem to be developing a conscience. After all these years it looks like my old Sunday school teacher may have been right: crime doesn’t pay. Although I have a whole lifetime’s career in the City that says otherwise!

I have been mesmerised by the Twitterati. They seem to fall into 2 main camps: the hunters and the hunted. British hunters are typically aggrieved, educated pro EU types who believe they are victimized by stupid, racist, people bent on destroying the Home Counties way of life and all who live there.

The hunted are composed mainly of anyone not pro-EU, who thinks they are being patronized by the hunters, that Britains culture (whatever that is?) is being undermined and/or are being victimized by poor, desolate foreigners intent on stealing their way of life and anyone vaguely left or liberal in their intentions.

The point being everyone on Twitter seems to feel victimized in some way and this justify’s their spite and loathing and wails of unfairness, injustice & being ‘got at’.

A few people use it to tell jokes or publish life high-lights but they mostly get crushed by the wall of cynicism that drives this particular stream.

The main thing to post on Twitter is about anything that reinforces the author’s pet prejudices and ‘it is all the oppositions fault’, even when they are not clear who the opposition are. These days it’s mainly: The Government, Boris Johnson, Boris Johnson’s children, his dog, his girlfriend, his advisors, his school & university circles and anyone who is likely to vote or has voted Tory. Donald Trump, The Russians and Isobel Oakeshott.

The hunted don’t have to be on Twitter to be hated and ridiculed – but it helps.

I wonder as I read the reams of invective whether we have always been a Nation of bi-partisan bile, spite and anguish and Twitter is our natural outlet or whether Social Media is its own self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity because of the semi-autonomus nature of fight-picking and score settling that is permitted by it’s construct.

And where in all this bi-partisan mess is the middle ground? The floating voter? The open minded people looking at policies rather than partisan feelings, facts instead of cant?

There is no place for open-mindedness, fair-play & rational challenge in Twitter’s 280 characters. It is a rapier for creating deep wounds, not an open field for reasoned debate. And that really answers my question about which came first; the cynical, victimized Brit or the medium he/she uses.

We can trace our inernecine social conflicts back to the headlines on the civil war pamphleeters output and probably even further to the Town Criers local gossip pedalled as headlines about the hunters & hunted of their time.

When it comes to shouting at each other, airing our prejudices, not offering any solutions for our ills and not listening to a word anyone else says we are a World leading Country indeed!