Jack’s sacked, and that’s that.
Tumblr and WordPress (which just literally crashed when I tried to set up a page) must be absolutely inundated with blogs like this.
For a while I’ve been considering setting up a journal, to hone my writing skills, for general catharsis, but I was lazy, and just hadn’t quite settled on a theme. Nothing struck me as important enough, relevant enough to my life or anyone else’s...but then, to my great good fortune, after a storm-tossed night of cars swimming down the road in Ruislip Manor and Keith Vaz staring disconsolately at the camera when he should have been talking, some kermit-faced excuse for Zeus raised his arms and summoned the eos rhododactylos of the New Age! And without a single bullet being fired, except for the three last week! And the clouds did part and the sun did shine but it only served to help us survey the wreckage.
Suddenly, just like that, I was inspired again. I could write about life in a sick, schizophrenic country dangling on the edge of a precipice, because the devil on just-two-percent-more-than-one-of-its-shoulders whispered in earnest, “Jump, jump, you can fly, you don’t need to worry about falling! Of course you can fly, you’re Union Jack! THE Union Jack!!” Seemed to me that this embarrassing scene could have at least some journalistic merit, if not much else to boast about.
The world’s watching us - we’re those little people far away that things happen to, and you see it on the News, and you sigh and shake your head and get on with your day. And the thing is, it’s not even that bad, obviously. We’re still a rich, developed country that’s doing alright, for now. Stuff’s happening elsewhere - nice things (Fallujah was liberated (ace!), a panda had twins (sweet!)), not so nice things (there are outbreaks of violence in South Sudan happening right now...and heck, looks like another right wing government in Spain...), but for the moment, by anyone’s standards, we enter the ranks of what I like to call major global fuck-ups.
I can offer you some observations, often ill-founded, probably confounded - we all are; there will be some ill-researched, oversimplistic suggestions as to how to solve everything with a magic wand, there will undoubtedly be more than one hiatus, and there will be bias, a whole lot of bias.