A day of reckoning… of sorts

 While I spent the day working, Ottawacker Jr. once more coughing downstairs, and Mrs. Ottawacker struggling to maintain her legendary sang froid in the face of magnificent stupidity from her finance department, the people of Great Britain had a job to do. It wasn’t quite as important as the job they abysmally failed to do in 2019 – to wit the Brexit vote – but it was as if the massed voices echoing “I told you so” finally caught hold of something resembling grey matter. If I sound as if I am bitter, I am. It is not just my life that has been screwed up by Johnson’s stupidity and mendacity, by Farage’s bigotry and xenophobia, by the electorate’s blindness and apathy, the life of my son has been made harder, the lives of countless thousands of people have been made poorer, and the lives of the destitute and the desperate have been either blighted permanently, or lost. Bitter? The word is meaningless compared to the anger, contempt and disgust I feel.
 
Well, apparently, I wasn’t alone in these feelings, because the Conservatives got their arses handed to them on a plate. Rees-Mogg, Truss, Gullis, Coffey, Fabricant… out. Marina Hyde puts it brilliantly in The Guardian: “It also closed out several years of mindboggling chaos, dysfunction and national decline. They won’t be playing anything from this album on the Conservative party’s Eras tour. The Tories have cycled through five prime ministers over the past eight years, to the point where they were recently found going through the rubbish, pulling the first guy back out, thinking, ‘Actually, he doesn’t look half bad now,’ and making him foreign secretary. This is the behaviour of addicts.”

So, the Tories are toast, and now the job for Starmer is to make something work – or else the Reform vote will shoot up in 5 years time and we’ll be back looking at biopics of Oswald Mosley, Laurence Fox, and the Daily Heil on UKGold. For the time being, there is cause for optimism – albeit tempered optimism, as I am not sure I like Starmer any more than I liked Cameron – but he deserves, at least, a bedding-in period and a chance. At least the electorate did its job. Better late than never? Actually, not at all. You cannot repair what is dead – and the desperate damnation of the past decade, the hopelessness and misery of the past 5 years compare unfavourably to death in many respects – but there is a chance for a fresh start. In my opinion, without a reversal of Brexit, the start and, indeed, the country is doomed to failure. It is, at the very least, a step on the road to salvation.

Meanwhile, here, in the relatively sane Canadian bubble (although relatively is a relative word), life continues a-pace. Ottawacker Jr. is sick again, but managed to play football out in the wilderness of Russell last night. His team got hammered 5-0 – and, while he wasn’t directly responsible for them, he could have done better on at least three of the goals. Maybe he had had too much Benadryl.