MY friend Martin Stepek calms Scotland with a regular mindfulness newsletter. The latest is headed Sleep Wonderful Sleep, and begins: "Many of us are quite fatigued. More tired than we should be. This tiredness leads to ‘grumpiness and lack of ability to think clearly’."
LEFT and Right in Britain hate each other in different ways. The Labour Party have naturally always loathed the Tories ("lower than vermin", as Aneurin Bevan put it). At rare moments, they have dreamed of frog-marching the Tories to the dustbin of history and slamming the lid down. But on the whole they have hoped that "history" – a spreading awareness that the Conservative Party and its policies were a faded joke – would do the job for them. Meanwhile, Tories safely kept in their box had to be lived with.
IT was something I hadn’t talked about. A lifetime ago, at the age of 19, I killed two dying men. It was 1952 and during the Malayan "Emergency" when I was a National Service lieutenant in 42 Commando Royal Marines. In the aftermath of an ambush, two of the enemy (Communist guerrillas at war with "British imperialism") lay horribly wounded on the ground.
ALL over the world, left-wingers have their faces in their hands. (And by left-wingers, I mean everyone who believes that humans were made to co-operate rather than compete.) A prevailing mass of Americans, not all white and certainly not all poor, have turned to a lying, bullying demagogue who promises "to make America great again".
WHY can’t politicians learn to keep their trousers on? There goes Labour MP Keith Vaz, one of the few really effective operators at Westminster, knocked out of his select committee job by a tabloid sting which revealed him consorting with rent boys. There went Stuart Hosie MP, sober and formidable depute leader of the SNP until his affair with journalist Serena Cowdy (who previously had a relationship with SNP MP Angus MacNeil). There, indeed, have gone a sorry procession of politicians over the years, especially since the techniques of secret recording and phone-hacking were learned by journalists.
Louise Bourgeois built spiders. The other day in London, they opened a new wing at the Tate Modern, and there’s a special room for her. She died six years ago, aged 98, as strange and bold an imagination as any artist of her century. Surreal limbs, mirror-installations, abstractions, but also these spiders.
"I HIT bottom. But then I heard somebody tapping from underneath." It’s a Polish saying. But it’s immigrated to Britain. Each time, you think there’s nothing worse they can do. And each time another even grosser blunder arrives to splinter away more of the world’s diminishing respect for the United Kingdom. And here once more comes the English political elite, treating their subjects as credulous peasants, and getting away with it.
"FOR we are the people of England / That never have spoken yet." So, famously, wrote GK Chesterton. But now they have spoken, with an immense roar which has frightened all Europe and even some of their own Brexit supporters. The trouble is that nobody is quite sure what they meant to say.
FOUR days to go. As in Scotland two years ago, the torrent of public participation in England is running faster than the politicians can keep up with it. And there’s another resemblance. This referendum is supposed to be about membership of the European Union, in or out. But at a deeper, hidden level it’s a debate about English independence – England’s own indyref.
