£10 for Lavazza Rossa? What The Actual Fuh?

 

£10 for a twin-pack of Lavazza Rossa? It was £6 (on a Nectar offer, I grant) in the summer. A couple of years ago, it was less than that.

Has there been a coffee drought? 

Google says so. Brazil was hit by a drought this summer and production was down. Since coffee is the second-most important substance in the world (after lithium for all those iPhone batteries) for the media classes, you'd think this would have been on the front pages of every UK newspaper. Woe is us, for our Starbucks will cost far, far more. But no, because the UK media are obsessed with Westminster gossip. 

Never mind. The rumour is that the olive harvest was good this year, so we may not be paying £12+ for ordinary virgin oil, like we are at the moment.

None of this would have happened if we were still in the EU. We would have had a sunny summer as well. In fact, it would have been like this...

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(Richard Burton was the original and greatest. I saw him in it when I was a nipper, and it deserved every day of its long run.)

What I Missed In The Lockdowns

Regular readers will have long ago realised that I am not the life and soul of the party. I don’t have people knocking on the door because they “were in the neighbourhood”. I don’t spend a lot of time on my mobile in conversations about whatever it is that those people who do spend lots of time on their mobiles have conversations about.

My needs for contact with the outside world are fairly modest. I like to sit in cafes for a while, watch people go by and hear the background chatter, or walk along a shopping street and see people going about their daily lives, or wander round a bookshop or a record shop, or go to the movies, or maybe some dance, and have something to eat in a restaurant now and again, where the presence of other people is part of the experience.

None of that is too much to ask. It has been provided by cities since the first one was founded only historians know when. Yet it vanished like sunshine on a cloudy day in March 2020, and did not really return until 2023. (Sure there were people moving around in 2022, but only in the second half, and the mood was still a bit odd.)

 

(Going home from the dentist: Piccadilly Circus 13/1/2021 18:50)

When discussing the Lockdowns, I have tended to focus on the feeling of threat, not from a bad flu virus, but from the Government, the so-called “experts” advising it, and the local council officials implementing and even interpreting many of the ever-changing regulations: they were unaccountable and unregulated, and the “experts” were often acting from ideological motives that don’t bear examination. That would scare anyone.

Recently, I’ve come to appreciate that what I really missed was the very little I asked of and for my social life. Partly because, well, who could really miss so little? Does it even qualify as a “social life”?

Well, it doesn’t matter whether someone else doesn’t call it a social life.

What matters is that I missed it and it affected the way I felt. It wasn’t much of a mooring cable to the rest of the world, but it was enough, and when it was cut, I drifted.

What about the work? I was working from home, dealing e-mails, taking part in conference calls (and Teams when they finally shipped us decent laptops in autumn 2020), and so on. Wasn’t that a mooring cable?

Well, clearly not. Work is not the same as life - which is why we contrast it in the phrase “work-life balance”. “Relationships” at work rarely translate into acquaintanceships in real life. A busy work life does not fill the gap of an empty personal life.

People with domestic relationships may not have felt the lack of being able to wander through the daily tide of people. Perhaps they even found it a relief.

I didn’t.

Aspects of Immigration: Canada

I am going to let this one speak for itself.

   

Of course, nothing like this happens in the UK. There are no universities which depend for their continued liquidity on the colossal fees from foreign students, and there's no suggestion that those students are awarded degrees about one grade up from what they deserve, because the examiners are aware of the realities of academic economics. Oh. Wait. There are. In fact, find one that doesn't.

The Coming Starmer / Labour Decade

Everyone who didn't vote for him, and a few who did, are now piling in on Sir Kier Starmer. At any moment, they hope, another revelation about who paid for his underwear will remove him from office. Just like the Left did when Thatcher got in.

Nope.

Ain't gonna happen. (Also just what happened when Thatcher got in.)

He's here for the next ten years, because the Conservatives will not be electable in 2029, and will not be able to assemble a coalition government.

(Also just like the 1980's, but in reverse.)

Good times (1990-2008) elect weak leaders; weak leaders make bad times (2008 - 2034); bad times elect strong leaders; strong leaders make good times.

We are now at Peak Weak. First Boris Johnson - who himself admitted that it was ridiculous he was Prime Minister - and now Sir Kier Starmer and his cabinet. Rishi Sunak wasn't as bad as either of those, but he wasn't going to bring good times either.

So get ready for ten years of posturing, distracting, and oblivious legislation and social policy.

Labour has two jobs.

The first is to reduce the cost of the NHS to the taxpayer by at least a half, while improving Maternity, Neo-natal and A&E services.

The second is to stop and reverse illegal immigration.

I hope they do one or both.

Because I don't want to see the state of this country if they can't do either.

You won't either.

And you need to pray that competent people choose to go into politics in the next ten years, or you will just have more weak leaders.

Catch-Up

At the end of August, I got a cold, followed by a cough that wracked my torso for a couple of days, and by about two weeks later, I felt physically better, but lacking a certain amount of zip and zest. Even in this fourth week, I'm still lacking get-up-and-go.

It got so bad that I drafted a farewell post - I mean, after not posting anything for four weeks, a blog is defunct, right? And it would be if I was doing this for money or reputation. But I'm not. I thought about the reasons for stopping (running out of ideas, feeling tired, run it's course) and for carrying on (gives me a reason to figure stuff out, to vent about the stupidity du jour). The best reason for keeping a personal blog is that it's a journal that's edited for public consumption. A journal isn't one's Morning Pages. Those fulfil a very different purpose.

So I am going to carry on. The posts from the 9th to the 23rd are part gratuitous filler, and a couple that I drafted during those weeks but couldn't commit to publishing.

However, this is one of those colds that puts an upper limit on my ability to plan ahead or produce long chains of consecutive thought. So there may be stutters.

In the meantime, here's a new track from Alix Perez, who practices the lighter side of drum and bass.

Making Normal

Most of the practical suggestions that psycho-hyphenates make are for people who are a) usually okay, but having a bad time, or, b) can remember a time when they were okay, but then something happened to mess that up.

Then there are people who, c) cannot remember being “okay”, and in fact wonder what the hell you’re all talking about.

Which is me. A long time ago, when I was in early recovery, my GP referred me to some NHS therapy sessions (those were the days): the therapist who triaged me asked if I could remember a time when I felt happy or “all right”, I said I couldn’t, and an expression flickered across her face. I didn’t understand what and why at the time, but it didn’t look like an “oh goody” expression.

C-type people, who can’t remember ever feeling “okay”, have to do something Dr Scott Eilers calls “making normal”. They need to define for themselves what “being okay” means, arrange their lives to fit that definition, monitor themselves for how well they are living up to it, praise themselves for doing well, and be gentle with themselves when they slip and need to get back on track.

Regular people, by contrast, just live. They don’t need to put any effort into maintaining their idea of how they should be living, of what’s “normal”. They don’t have any sense that how they live is a choice, whereas for C-types, everything they do is a choice, and nothing is natural. It’s all conscious. A construction. It has to be kept up by habit and effort. “Making normal” imposes a lot of overhead load.

How do you spot us? We're the ones who make lists of how we should live, even if it’s reduced to a slogan like Work hard, exercise, eat right, don’t drink too much, stay away from drugs, avoid losers users and abusers, and don’t buy things you don’t need with money you don’t have to impress people you don’t like.

10 Photography Thoughts

It's well past time Councils all over the country had to prune back the trees and cut back the undergrowth - un-tended growth is ruining the photgenicity. 

Take the shot at right angles or straight on. Taking the shot at an angle, especially upwards, introduces awkward perspectives, unless that's the effect you want

Don't try to frame it in the camera. Take a wider shot and crop. With all those megapixels, there will be plenty left to give a decent image.

Make a silk purse out of a sow's ear with brutal cropping.

Sometimes a place has (say) seventeen good photographs in it, and when you've go them, you're done with it.

There's something wrong with my eyesight, because every shot I take is off-vertical. Every. Single. One. 

 
You can never have enough sky, but you can have too much foreground - late nineteenth-century wide-angle plate shots of empty Parisian streets and squares aside.

I am never talking a photograph of plants or flowers again. Ever.

Sometimes you can't get what you want in the shot - just try taking a good photograph of the Reaper drone at the RAF Museum, Hendon. With an X-E4 and a 35mm lens. I tried - wouldn't work.

Photos has a Hide Photograph option - use it if you can't bring yourself to delete something truly average.

BONUS: You can never have too much bright sunny blue.