McMinn and Cheese

The universe tends towards entropy, and Britain’s post-war settlement lurches on to its own heat death. I find it interesting that the language of science uses words like “chaos” and “disorder” when describing the tendency, when for me the ultimate fate of the universe would seem to be stasis. Static. It’s the same with traffic, isn’t it: when everything stops, the tabs call it “traffic chaos” when its actually traffic stasis. Paralysis.

That queue to view a wooden box draped in a flag is more stasis.

This week, “out of respect”, everything has got a little bit shittier. Funny that. Respect for the corpse of a symbolic link to lies about Britain’s past takes precedent over everything else, whether it is our freedom of speech or customer service.

Brexit and the pandemic both already did considerable damage to the economy and our quality of life. I’m sure there are still some areas of the country where it’s possible to see a doctor, but around here, it’s more or less impossible. My most recent in-person appointments have been with a nurse practitioner and a paramedic, and I’ve spoken with what seems to be the last available doctor over the telephone. I say “spoken”. Mostly the conversation was me asking them to repeat themselves because I couldn’t hear a word they were saying.

I read in the Graun the other day that, in desperation, people are “going private” in order to get operations impossible to get on the NHS. Which made me despair just a little bit (more), because of course all those private operations will be done by doctors also employed by the NHS, often in NHS hospitals. So if I’d been writing the headline, it would have been about rich people jumping the queue and making people who can’t afford private healthcare wait even longer. But what do I know?

I’ve always believed that things would have to get much much worse before people woke up and started taking action. Well: people are finally out on the street, but they’re queuing to look at a flag on a box. Meanwhile, 50 Stop Oil protesters were jailed on a single day.

I heard a discussion on a podcast about the realities of abolishing the monarchy. There’s a clever sleight on hand the media does over this. They pretend there’s a binary choice between a political (and probably unpopular) president, and a symbolic head of state who lives in several palaces and castles. I don’t give a shit about King Charles vs President Blair (which is often the way the binary choice is presented). But I would love to see the rest of the parasites cut off from the public teat, and the end to scenes such as we’ve seen this week. Prince fucking Edward with his chestful of medals from five minutes in the army. Prince fucking Andrew anywhere anytime.

And it’s not just the unelected monarchy; it’s the House of Lords, and the honours system, and the system of patronage and old school ties. It’s the crests and the logos and the crowns (give the diamond back to India) and the sceptres and the magic wands. It’s the unfit-for-purpose Palace of Westminster, which should be replaced with a debating chamber with enough seats for everyone which are arrayed in a semicircle rather than on opposite benches. It’s the first past the post election system and the lack of true representation. All of that! Not just King fucking Charles, so don’t reduce the debate to, “Would you want a President Blair, though?”

But the answer is, actually, yes I would, because his term would be limited, and we could vote him out if we wanted to. Better than what we have now, which is stasis.

So put all that shit in a museum and give us a working democracy instead of this charade. 

Younger daughter FaceTimed from Albuquerque this afternoon, asking for help with charging the camera battery. She has borrowed my Olympus OM-D for her year in the US, and took with her the charger and battery (of course), but not a lead to connect the charger to the mains. I told her to get a cheap figure-8 power cable when she got there.

This she did. So now she was on the phone/screen, holding the figure-8 lead and the Li-Ion battery from the camera, and asking how it was possible to connect one to the other. I explained that she needed the actual charger, and for a moment she was nonplussed, thinking she hadn’t packed it. But she had, and the pieces were soon put together.

But then I was left thinking how much I’d failed her, that she didn’t understand the basics of how this camera system worked. What a world! We’ve already fast-forwarded past the stage of removable batteries, so that younger people are all at sea with something as basic as a system camera. This is like when I discover that my students don’t know how to set margins and line spacing on a document.

There’s a frightening tendency to just accept things as they are, whether that’s a document template or an operating system.

DEFAULT POSITION.

As someone who has always run screaming from the defaults, I am frankly bewildered. The idea of using an iPad as my main computer, and being stuck with the fonts that came with it, makes me shudder.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the bugbear of the dead Queen and the expectation that I’ll give a shit. You know that Tories and monarchists are going to bleat on a fair bit with their platitudes and bromides, but what really sticks in the craw are the lefty liberals who solemnly intone that, even for republicans, this is a Moment.

Default position. When it comes to things like this, people always reveal their true colours. The privately educated, Oxbridge media crowd who are paid to have opinions for money, are going to reliably explain (Oxplain?) why this is Important, even to those of us who have never watched a Royal wedding, funeral, or Christmas speech. So they all fall in line behind the party line. This is a Moment.

No, it fucking isn’t. All I’m feeling right now is a low-level irritation that people won’t shut the fuck up. I was also pleased to note the quiet roads when I went out on my bike. A little throwback to the happy days of lockdown. But earlier, I came home from town to find my OH watching TV, a long and repetitive ceremony in which the King dealt with some admin at length. Riveting, I thought, as I walked through the room with the shopping bags. And flashbacks for me back to the Investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, which for some reason (possibly whooping cough) I was at home to endure, wondering why Andy Pandy (or whatever) wasn’t on.

So, just as I failed my daughter when it comes to technology, the media has failed to seize the moment. Absolutely nobody is asking why we’re not taking the opportunity to abolish the monarchy and move on. And yet, when it was safe to do so, a year ago, five years ago, when it was only theoretical, that’s exactly what they were doing.

The most important discussion we’re not having is, with what do we replace up the Queen’s twat as a toast when we sit down for drinks with friends. Up the King’s twat is anatomically incorrect, so what? Up the King’s Arse?