Darkness

Black candle

I wasn’t sure which image to use so I used both. I put the candle one first because if I didn’t there would be no point in carrying on.

Black

The lights are going out all over Britain. I shall not see them lit again in my lifetime.

I will, however, keep a candle burning on the windowsill/mantelpiece/shelf because without one I might give up. I hope the windows are decently sealed against strong gusts of wind.

BlackBlackBlackBlackBlackBlackBlack

Click here

I resent having my rights, which I’ve had all my adult life and have freely and happily enjoyed for half of it, taken away and that feeling will remain with me until I die.

People I have no respect for have fucked up my life, and I face a real challenge to salvage anything from the wreckage.

I will not smile. Nothing to smile about. And I will never forgive the people who did this to me. Ever.

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This is my windowsill

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

383 thoughts on “Darkness”

    2. Very moving, OP. Thanks. Much better to be moved by the positive message related by those heroes than to let myself get angry watching the blinkered dickheads cavorting around parliament square last night. I couldn’t stomach that.

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  4. Morning everyone,

    I watched a bunch of people in a pub in Kettering singing “We’ll meet again” and thought: “That’s the music from the closing scene of ‘Dr Strangelove'”.

    Did anyone see our adverts in The Times and the Evening Standard?

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      1. If I lived there I would start greeting everyone with “Bonjour” or “Guten Tag” and hope that one of them was the person who posted this so I could annoy them.

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    2. Although if Farage seriously thinks that 1066 was the last time England (i.e. Britain, to him) was invaded – or even the last time it was successfully invaded – he’s even more ignorant about history than he chooses to appear.

      BTW, was it “1066 And All That” which claimed that the last English king was Harold? (approximately, “Since when we’ve had French, more French, Welsh, Scottish,Dutch and Germans.”).

      Clever stuff.

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      1. If Farage thinks that 1066 was the he last time England (ie Britain to him) was invaded, he’s even more ignorant than he chooses to appear.

        I think that’s all you needed.

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        1. It’s good that the other journalists walked out in solidarity. Let’s hope that continues to happen. However, it just shows that Trump’s malign influence is now mainstream in British politics.

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          1. At Johnson’s speech, when it came to the press questions bit, he specifically asked Beth Rigby of Sky to ask the first one, and then invited the Express, the Times, the Mail and the Sun, in that order (I think). Somewhere along the line he invited Gary Gibbon of Channel 4.

            Only then did he invite more questions, and Laura Kuenssberg got to ask one (which he basically dismissed), then Robert Peston (whom he interrupted to get a laugh), Paul Waugh of Huff Post, a Greek journalist from Ta Nea, one of the biggest papers here, who asked about the poster in the flats in Norwich which Johnson claimed to know nothing about, he then asked Gary Gibbon again and realised he’d already asked one, then there was someone else. (I’m doing this from memory, sorry.)

            John Crace and Tom Peck weren’t allowed in, as they’d been told it was one journalist from each outlet, but Francis Elliott of the Times was there and so was Quentin Letts, who is now the Times’ sketch writer (and an ardent Brexiteer). Crace and Peck were not amused, as their Twitters show.

            It’ll be intersting to see how Jack Blanchard covers it tomorrow morning.

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            1. Letts is the reason I stopped collecting a gratis Times on the way out of work (leaving it for the recycling bin instead). I found him so actively malignant to read it was probably bad for my health. Even the Atherton-Ammon tag team couldn’t compensate for the vileness elsewhere in the paper.

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            2. I think we can conclude that John Crace wasn’t impressed. That was really quite a personal and bitter attack on the fat chump.

              I’ll be interested to see what he says about the hardening of the government’s approach to journalistic free speech in the talk at Keswick in March. Especially in the question and answer session at the end.

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    2. ‘I want it as it is now, what I nearly sacrificed my life for.’

      I have to say, I laughed out loud at that line.

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  17. No one replied to my post from a couple of days ago about the two sentences and their combined significance.

    I now see I never managed to click send at an apropriate time (or maybe I deleted it in a drunken mist of gloom and despair).

    Here they are again… :

    Monty arrived at the entrance, as all the rest returned with Tom.

    Pa’s Moorish descent gives him a venturesome sort of nature.

    What do these two sentences, together, signify?????????????

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    1. “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”

      George Orwell, 1984

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        1. I think I’ve probably said before that I think Johnson read 1984 as a young man and thought it was a handbook for government.

          Suspending parliament, banning words (Brexit) and attempting to control how news is reported could certainly have come from Orwell’s pen.

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    1. Let’s hope that these people never go abroad. Or if they do, that they speak solely in the language of their hosts.

      I’m *sure* that’s the case.

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  24. I’m putting this here because I can.

    The one and only Dave Edmunds, the man who *sort-of* invented ‘*a bit*’ of the Ramones ‘*unique sound*’ with a few added twiddles.

    He first recorded this in 1968, with Love Sculpture (but you already know that).

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  25. I see no one’s responded to my Two Sentences Poser from yesterday afternoon.

    I wanted first to see if anyone else knew this, and it looks like no one does.

    Here are the sentences again:
    Monty arrived at the entrance, as all the rest returned with Tom.

    Pa’s Moorish descent gives him a venturesome sort of nature.

    So, a clue (or two).

    I have had these two sentences memorised for over 50 years, from school. And Rooto and mesnilman might be best placed to work out why and what for.

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        1. Shouldn’t they return to Tom’s Party? (I can see why you’d not bother remembering rentrer, devenir and revenir, but partir is quite important – or have I missed something somewhere? Also, there must have been a better option than ‘venturesome’?) (I should stress that my command of grammar is such that French people frequently wince…)

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            2. My German teacher – Mrs Felix-Davies – would be happy with me there. OK, so I didn’t know about that extra entlang rule, but then again, I only ever did 16+ German.

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              1. Apparently entlang + acc. used to be a thing, but it sounds really wrong. And wider is a tad old-fashioned, too. Learning German must be fun. I’ve tried to learn Slovenian and those cases are really annoying, they all end in the same letters but for different cases depending on gender. And of course you have to learn genders for things, and they have different genders from German things. What a silly language! Also, they have a special form for two people or things, for both verbs and nouns, I think, which is fairly rare in Grammar. The only other language where this is an important thing is Arabic, and there’s some old Croatian dialects that have it, or so I seem to remember from looking this up once.

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                1. Er… Wow! I realise my hard-won ability to speak workable French and a smattering of Italian really doesn’t amount to a collina of fagiolini, compared to the real languages out there. I’ve never understood what a case is, never mind which one should be used and when…
                  As for romeo’s sentences, I wasn’t particularly close to getting it. I had to learn the ‘être’ verbs using a picture of people running around a castle. It’s at least comforting to discover that all the grammar we struggled with in secondary school is still being struggled with by French kids in primary schools today!

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                2. Dual verb forms existed (but were not often used in literature) in Ancient Greek (I remember…), and apparently are still to be found in Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Lithuanian, as well as Slovene.

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  26. Evening, all. This one’s a continuation of an earlier conversation with HPG, so forgive me for talking shop. HPG, I know you’re connected to Wonkhe because I have read your articles there with interest. Did you see the piece from Paul Greatrix this week in which he said that “Ofsted for universities” was also one of his favourite regulatory threats in a very good piece about the over regulation of universities?

    I particularly enjoyed the completely made up graph.

    I’ve only just discovered today that if we even take a committee decision about talking to a new UK OfS registered partner, that is potentially a ‘reportable event’. I share Paul’s fears that excessive regulation is only going to get worse.

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    1. I do have some connections with WonkHE but they do like to heavily edit my pieces (mind you they’re usually about 200 words over the count) which means they don’t always make sense when they’re printed.

      I do worry that we’re seeing greater intrusion into HE but what troubles me particularly is there seems to be no collective idea *why* HE needs interfering in and to what purpose. I know that there is no good data on actual graduate demand for example, because I’ve been asked to look into it. So Government doesn’t really know how large they think HE should be, or really what they think it should be for. So how can they put in more regulation? What’s it designed to achieve? Is there a *genuine*, insoluble quality issue in the sector? The issues Paul cites are arguably (ie they are) unintended consequences of rushed policy. Rushing more policy without considering the consequences is going to cause more issues.

      I’m not convinced by the ‘Ofsted for universities’ idea because the practical barriers to building and staffing such an organisation are really very great. But some of the policy ideas being bandied around (or implemented), are not what I’d choose to do, so what do I know?

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      1. There’s a very good example of that confusion today. In the Times, Gavin Williamson issues a “final warning” to universities and student unions over freedom of speech. Meanwhile, the OfS publishes findings on Prevent – which orders universities to clamp down on free speech. The whole business over supposed grade inflation is another good example. It seems a lot of policy at the moment is rushed through as a reaction to headlines. I think universities are also a convenient target to kick right now. Aren’t we all tired of experts?

        Mind you, I’m in a spectacularly bad mood at the moment so I may be thinking even more apocalyptically than usual…

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  27. And in other news, have been talking to Ma and Pa Gal a lot this week as Pa Gal has been going through another round of tests (good news this time – his swollen leg has finally been diagnosed as secondary lymphoedema and he can finally get some management for the condition). But pretty much every conversation with them I’ve had to politely curtail because one or the other of them have dropped really quite ‘England for the English’ bombs into the conversation. They are Daily Express readers.

    I count every day that Pa Gal is alive a bonus, given the amount of conditions he is now having to cope with, and I live in dread, and expectation, that one day I will get that phone call from Ma Gal that he’s on the way out. It makes me livid that those final days, and memories, may be coloured by arguments with him and Ma Gal over misplaced nationalism.

    I fucking hate what Brexit has done to this country, and to family relations.

    Had to get that off my chest.

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  28. I don’t know if everyone’s already seen this, but I hadn’t. It’s almost half an hour, and filmed in Liverpool, in places such as Penny Lane (including the barber’s), the house McCartney lived in during his teens and until after the Beatles became big, and the Philharmonic Dining Rooms, the pub which has just been Grade 1 listed (which is how I came upon this). John Lennon once said the worst bit of fame was not being able to have a pint in the Phil.
    It’s highly recommended:

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  29. Here’s the Manchester Evening News report on the spot-fixing sentencing:

    https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/nasir-jamshed-manchester-crown-court-17711006

    In so many of these reports, there seems to be an inability to distinguish between ‘bookmakers’ and ‘betting syndicates’. Surely a bookmaker wouldn’t be bothered to get a batsman not to score off the first two balls of a match, whereas a betting person or persons might well. I don’t know anything about betting on cricket (apart from winning on Sri Lanka beating England in a series a few years ago) but a bookmaker would have to offer odds on an event for a bet to be made. I can just envisage a scenario where one bookmaker might be persuaded to offer odds on such an event, but I don’t see how a lot of bookmakers could be ‘taken in’. Surely it is bettors, or betting syndicates, not actual (and illegal) bookmakers who are behind fixing (facilitated by the mere illegality of bookmakers perhaps).

    Maybe I’m being ignorant or naive. (I often am.)

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