A simple prop to occupy my time
Hello, hello. Well here we are in week 2 already – where does the time go, eh? Summer appears to be over in the UK, but it’s still brain meltingly hot here. We spent part of the weekend supporting runners in a series of local races and there were some folk looking like they were about to keel over in the heat. Including me, as concussion gave way to mild heatstroke.
In spite of my ongoing attempts to kill off my braincells, we had a lovely weekend, including a fab dinner at La R’mize on Friday night.
Madame La Directrice at our local bar has taken a liking to us, which took the form of complimentary kir pétillant on Friday afternoon and a bonus joke in French. I got about 60% of it at best, but as the punchline clearly involved the stupidity of Les Hommes, I think I laughed in all the right places.
Moving neatly on from stupidity, one of my favourite films is Pride – Stephen Beresford’s beautifully and previously untold story of how the LGBT community helped a small mining town in South Wales during the 1984 miners’ strike. It’s a wonderful film, offering all the feel good stuff that I’m occasionally allowed to enjoy in a film; warmth, humour, solidarity, outrage, emotion, Bread and Roses – which I still remember my raging Irish feminist Mamgu singing when I was very small – Andrew Scott…and a whole host of other stuff besides.
Why do I mention this? Well the final scene, which has me howling every time I watch it, is set to Billy Bragg’s “There Is Power in a Union”. I’m not here to argue the merits for and against unions, although I’m pretty sure nobody will be surprised about where my opinion lies. My observation, for want of as objective a word as possible, is that here we are, almost 40 years on and nothing, NOTHING has changed. Last week, the UK government changed the law to allow businesses to hire agency workers to plug staffing gaps caused by strike action – what was a criminal offence is now, apparently “an option for business”, according to Kwesi Kwarteng’s twitters.
Watching, from a distance, the absolute shitstorm that is UK politics right now has me with my head in my hands a great deal of the time but this…this is the thing that’s had me stamping around, muttering and banging things. The right to withdraw labour remains, but has been rendered pointless and insignificant, because everybody is, it seems, expendable. And if this doesn’t make me go and hit the buy button on a t shirt declaring “If you’re not angry then you’re not paying attention” then nothing will.
I’d planned to offer you a pensée on mental health and running, but to honest I think I’ve shot my bolt for today. Politics and le supermarché have done for me, so that’ll have to keep for another day.
In the meantime, if you haven’t yet watched Pride, then do. Although unless you have a thing for weeping women, perhaps not with me.
