Where we are now.

The Queen has awarded the George Cross to the NHS. I'm not sure which part of the crumbling infrastructure you pin that on, but we'd better get on with it before the NHS is asset stripped and boxed off to the states like an unwanted London bridge. 

July 19th, two weeks from today, is the proposed date for the government dropping all restrictions, and pretending this whole pandemic thing never happened. They got lucky with the early part of the vaccine roll out, lots of people went for their jabs. But we've reached the feckless idiot level now, and at exactly the point that government should be pushing the idea that its a really good idea to get vaccinated, they're giving up. In the SSE Arena when I was having my jabs, when it still looked like a medical facility in a sci fi movie - as if you'd slip behind a plastic screen to find a screaming man-pig hybrid strapped to a gurney - there was a no photos policy. 

Now, there are selfie stations in the arena, and people are actively encouraged to take photos of themselves and their puncture marks. Its a good idea, people are all about their socials after all. And its fucking tragic. This constant attempt to lure idiots to do something that benefits someone other than themselves, and their point blank refusal to do so, is chilling. Of course, the government don't understand this idea either. The basic problem all along has been that we need to do things that benefit the mass of people, and Tories don't understand that. They can't get their heads around it. It's antithetical to their notions of rugged individualism. Which is why they've spent the last year and a half giving free money to their mates, having restrictions-rogering affairs, and failing constantly in public. I said a year ago that the outcome from this will be Johnson's government washing their hands (ha) of the whole thing and blaming the public for their own deaths. And that's just what they're doing. It won't make them any less popular. Because nothing ever does. 

The football is going well for England at the moment, but some people are refusing to watch the games as the "virtue signalling" footballers, some of whom are black, are taking the knee at the start of the game. And then winning. Ha. 

I have an interesting relationship with England now I don't live there. I'm half Irish, my family are mostly Irish and I live in Ireland. My friends are Irish. And the Irish are LOVING this. Every pig ignorant declaration from the red tops, all the pink shouldered drunken idiots clumping on coastal resorts, all the flagrant stupidities, the triumphant rolling about in their own crapulence - the English look mad, present themselves as thugs, and are still draping everything in so many flags that even the Norn Loyalists are thinking its a bit much*. The Irish are loving it. Every post on social media attracts screeds of abuse, gleeful, hand-rubbing scorn. I imagine it would be largely the same if I lived in Scotland, France or Germany. 

But I'm English. I lived there a long time. I have a great many English friends. The English aren't like this. Not all of them. Some of them are cool, thoughtful, decent people who are epically embarrassed by ALL OF THIS. Even the southerners. I grew up in a town that has never not had a Conservative MP, and yet I'm not a bald headed thug vomiting paella and chips mid-dust-up in a Marbella pub called The John Bull. So, yes, I really am saying "Not all English..."

Its six years since my friend Jess visited me from America. She arrived around the time of the mini-twelfth, and I think the whole thing scarred her for life. 

Its seven years since my brother's wedding, a delightful day, where mine was definitely the BEST speech, and where my mum traveled to the wedding tent on the back of a tractor, which she was definitely not pleased about. She could get on the back of a tractor then. It's been a long seven years.

I go and visit her in a couple of weeks. I haven't been back to Basingstoke for nearly two years, and the effects of the pandemic have been marked on my mother. From the infrequent Zoomcalls I know she's a ghost of her former self - she's lost a ton of weight, her hair is white, she's basically immobile. But there's a degree of cognitive dissonance there - when I ring her she pretends to be fine and I join in. I know that when I'm there with her, there is going to be nowhere to hide. The truth will become self-evident. 

Susan's dad is having another eye operation, and with the sort of sod's law you might reasonably expect by now, it's happening two days before we fly to Basingstoke. Susan is now flying to the north of England, then back to Belfast, and then on to the south of England, within four days. That might be fine for you international jet-setter types, but we've barely been on a bus since last February. 

I just spent a week editing my short films. I'm anticipating the arrival of the first issue of "Exacting Clam", the American Literary Magazine that features one of my charming short-stories, and I am anticipating contracts to write my first Hollywood film. And that's where I am. 

Could be worse. 

*They aren't.