6 July 2024
Out here in the sticks, there are a lot of narrow roads with high banks on each side and few verges. There are also a lot of huge tractors that travel for long distances on them, normally towing huge trailers full of farming materials and sometimes, more unnervingly, huge tankers full of what smells like something our local water company is paying them to scatter over fields so it can then perfume the air for miles around before running off into our local rivers.
This inevitably leads to long queues of vehicles behind them and I have a theory that their drivers have a competition to see how many they can pile up behind them. “When oi got to the top o’ the hill today, oi could see about ‘alf a moile of cars and vans stuck behind me, oi I reckon about 40 on ‘em. How’d you do, moi lover?” “Oo ar, oi only catched about 25 behoind me but one on ‘em were a bus.”
Anyway, I saw one on the edge of town on Tuesday that had taken the corner too fast (in a 30 limit) and its trailer had toppled sideways, scattering a huge pile of hay bales over the hedge into the field beyond. Luckily, the tractor had stayed upright and the driver was standing by it, looking at the chaos and scratching his head, while the tourist cars full of fractious children and white van drivers with nails bitten to the quick made their way past it, waving thank you and other hand signals as they passed. (That’s ‘passed’ as in ‘passed’, not as in ‘died’.)
Do you know that white vans (some of which are black) are limited to 60 mph on all roads except motorways, even dual carriageways? Neither do their drivers. I keep meaning to ask our local police HQ how many white van drivers were prosecuted for exceeding 60 mph on the county’s roads last year. I reckon less than one.
Further up-country, roads have been busy with the traffic going to Glasto, which seems to have put on a good show with Seasick Steve playing to blues fans. (A friend told me that he was asked why he called himself Seasick Steve and he replied “Because I get seasick”.)
It was also good to hear that the actor Michael J Fox played guitar with Coldplay. What a brave man to show thousands of people how devastating Parkinson’s Disease is.
Also appearing was Janelle Monáe, wearing an outfit designed to look like a vulva. The crowd loved it and shouted about vaginas. What’s wrong with people? The vagina is an internal muscular tube while the vulva is what you see from outside and … oh, who cares.
Coldplay’s lead singer is Chris Martin who was born in Exeter and spent 10 years married to Gwyneth Paltrow, an American actor and nepo baby (I noticed her first in the brilliant film, The Royal Tenenbaums, and she has subsequently won an Oscar and a Golden Globe). Paltrow is now more famous for creating ‘Goop’, a company selling hugely overpriced goods claiming dubious health and well-being benefits that celebrate and enhance female sexuality.
One of her more famous products is, or was, a jade egg that is inserted into the vagina to … I’m not quite sure what it’s supposed to do but have a feeling you’d need to be very careful next time you go to the loo. She also sold candles supposed to smell like a vagina (that’ll be $75 please). Personally, I can think of several scents I’d rather candles produced, including that of tankers full of effluent being towed behind local tractors.
There has even been talk of benefits to be gained from some of the drugs that are currently illegal in the UK despite increasing medical evidence of the benefits that some can offer, such as the analgesic effects that the psychoactive components of cannabis can have on the pain caused by Multiple Sclerosis.
In America, the Drug Enforcement Administration has proposed that cannabis should be considered a medication rather than a narcotic. It is already legal in some states but its reclassification would mean that it would still need approval by the Food and Drug Administration and a doctor’s prescription in the other states and would remain more controlled than alcohol and tobacco even though cannabis is safer than either. It would also make it easier to study its effects in the medical field.
We did of course have an election in the UK last week, on America’s Independence Day, and the choice of date proved gratifyingly accurate. Its results were summarised using exactly the same words in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian and the i: “Labour Landslide”. This seemed a trifle unfair since, while there was undoubtedly an overwhelming shift to Labour, it was clear from the number of seats won by the smaller parties that the result was more a well-earned condemnation of the party that has damaged Britain so badly in the last 14 years.
Even Scotland followed suit and, after several uncomfortable years, the Scottish National Party was decimated. Actually, it was worse than that because “decimated” originally meant to defeat one tenth of ‘the other side’ and the SNP lost a lot more than a tenth of its MPs.
Even the new Reform party got some seats, including Nigel Farage who, after changing parties several times over his career, was finally elected an MP on his 8th attempt. It’ll be interesting to see how the new parliament works with such a wide range of views because it seems closer to representing the views of voters better than previous parliaments.
My diehard Conservative friend and I occasionally discuss the de/merits of Proportional Representation and he recently asked if I was still in favour of PR if it let people from parties I don’t like become MPs. I replied that he was missing the point because that was exactly what a properly constructed and regulated PR system would achieve. Just because I don’t like some parties’ policies doesn’t mean that I think they should be excluded from debates and, indeed, I believe that the more different points of view are discussed, the better the ultimate conclusion is likely to be.
Still, its’s going to take a few years to rebuild Britain and I just hope that Labour realises many of us would be happy to pay more tax to rebuild health and social care services and, if it impoverishes the privateer contractors who’ve been ripping billions of pounds out of public services, tough.
Lesser Mutterings 