The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
If it’s not past political figures being dug up, then some of their old policies are
There’s a great quote from a great film based on a great book – Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men – shared between a naive young lawman and his gnarled and grizzled, seen-it-all boss, played (magnificently) by the suitably gnarled and grizzled Tommy Lee Jones, doing his unmatchable impression of Mount Rushmore on legs. To say that man has a way with a line is like saying British politics is slightly dysfunctional.
Coming upon a crime scene of mayhem in a stark desert setting, the younger man turns to his older colleague and says: “It’s a mess ain’t it, sheriff ?” And Jones’s worldweary reply, in a southern drawl you could collect in a bucket, goes: “If it ain’t, it’ll do till the mess gets here.”
Well, in a nation where the mess got here some time ago and shows no signs of shoving off any time soon, you can’t get a much pithier exposition of life as we currently know it. It’s a load of old shambolics. In Scottish parlance (for life in this airt is equally turbulent, let’s not beat about the foliage), a moger. A boorach. A proper bowl of toenails.
And all over the place, there are past political figures coming out of the woodwork, like a dystopian version of Groundhog Day. And if they’re not being dug up, some of their policies are – which is somewhat disturbing when you lived through them the first time.
The national voting process, as I remarked a few weeks ago, still (even after the seismology of last Thursday’s little local difficulties south of the border) appears to have the gestation period of an elephant.
Then, with the final heave looming to get one general election off the starting blocks, it is suggested – and thankfully, by whatever arcane process of selection, headed off at the pass – that we in North Britain might have been looking at another.
Like buses, you wait forever, then two come along at once. Only like most British buses/trains/trams, they don’t. Or adhere to any recognisable form of timetable.
No wonder we’re all getting nowhere, fast. Or not very fast, actually.
It’s ironic, also, that the one thing that seems to be lacking in all these actual and potential leadership “contests” is exactly that. Leadership. Or at least much that might actually do until the leadership gets here. Nobody goes much for Rishi Sunak, except in the neck area or between the shoulder blades. Sir Keir Starmer already seems to have been around forever and he hasn’t even got to make a cods of being prime minister yet.
Hereabouts, I give you John Swinney,
although there are many who would not have him in a gift. And just when you thought it was safe to go back in the polling booth, there is Boris Johnson, like Banquo’s ghost, fossicking through all his ill-fitting pockets for the equally crumpled voter ID he has forgotten to bring with him.
Like all those invitations to “work events”, I suppose. And the events themselves. Old habits die hard.
You can almost hear him braying: “Do you know who I am?” Yes, Boris, unfortunately we do. But if you haven’t got your pensioner’s pass or true blue Brexit passport with you, you don’t get to come to – or to the aid of – this particular party. And with friends like you…
****
So now it’s May. May the 4th be with you? It’s been and gone. How on earth did it get to be May? Finding time going faster – and in many cases, more and more furiously in terms of seething anger and
general shortness of fuse – is supposed to be a function of age. It’s a perfect illustration of the Joni Mitchell syndrome – you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Show me a child of the ’70s who doesn’t sing the tune of Big Yellow Taxi as soon as those words are written or uttered and I’ll show you someone with cloth ears and a short memory.
It brings it home to you when they announce yet another TV iteration of the Rebus novels and you’re venerable enough to think that the last two were pretty recent. Eric Morecambe’s been dead for 40 years – 40 YEARS!!! And Victoria Beckham’s 50, for goodness’ sake. I bet even she sometimes looks at what’s going on around her and thinks a lot of it isn’t what she really, really wanted. “Zig-a-zig-aah!” I say, for want of anything more constructive to contribute.
Youth may not feel that far away but then you realise young people (and not so
young) are now referring to the 1990s as “the late nineteen hundreds”. Which I suppose technically they are but it’s kinda painful to think of an era, for much of which I wasn’t even 40, being referred to as if the Kaiser was just about to declare war on the rest of the world.
Although exchange the Kaiser for more modern dictators and wanna-be “strongmen” and we may not be that far from history repeating itself. Again.
Disturbing when you lived through them the first time