Brexit is as brexit does

I am sick of hearing politicians bickering about Brexit. The media love a scrap. Especially one where there aren't many public facts that require leg-work to check. So expect months and months more of it.

People talk as if "the deal" for 2019 is going to be the EU / UK relationship set in stone forever. It isn't. Our relationship with other countries has evolved over at least a thousand years; and will continue to evolve for many more decades at least ... until Amazon, Facebook and Google own everything and nation states become irrelevant.

I would rather remain in the EU. But clearly that can't happen now, since we have already given notice (article 50) and there is no mechanism to cancel. If we did try to re-apply to the EU do you think they would let us back in? It would require a unanimous vote of the 27 ... so it only takes one to hold a grudge ... and France really took some convincing to let is in in the first place.

So we are leaving. People need to accept that and move on. We aren't going to make a good start out there on our own if half the population keep griping about the referendum for the next 20 years. "This is all because of Brexit" might be true, but you can't turn back the clock, and every journey has to start from where you are, not where you would like to be.

There has been a conflict in Britain for decades about whether we should be more like America or more like Europe. That's because we have unique ties to both of those continents. The people pushing for Hard Brexit are free market zealots who believe in a small state and a winner-takes-all society - that's because they already won, and want their families to keep winning.

Everyone else is either arguing for No Brexit or just slagging off the Hard Brexit people as stupid. They aren't stupid, they have a plan. What is a better plan? Where is the alternative vision? By the next election we will be out of the EU. If the opposition parties don't have a clear alternative to offer the people (52% of which wanted to be out) then we will be stuck on a path to Americanisation.

I really don't want that.

Xenophobia is a symptom not a disease

There are quite a few people living in my home town that my mother would call Johnny Foreigners (*) if she were still alive. Being an affluent place, they are almost all either students, self-employed or people with jobs. In other words, they all make a net contribution to the community.

I know this. I am a mostly rational person.

And yet there are times when I feel uncomfortable with them around me. I think that is called xenophobia.

Yesterday I was walking along and there were 4 young men approaching from the other direction. This was fine until I could hear that they were talking in a foreign language. Not just a language I cannot speak; a language I could not even identify. Suddenly I felt threatened. For just a moment.

So it was their language, not their appearance.

Actually, it was probably their gender too. Because previously I have noticed that when there are women walking near me talking a foreign language, I don't feel threatened in the same way. I feel alienated. Like I don't fit in... in my home town.

It was that last point that got me thinking. I hardly ever talk to my neighbours. When I do, I kind of get the impression that they are just being polite and would rather be doing something else.

So people talking foreign languages around me are not threatening my sense of community. Instead they are making me realise that I don't really have a community to be part of.

Am I alone in this? Is the anti-immigrant (xenophobic) sentiment stoked by hate publications like the D@ily M@il, and interfering morons like Donald Trump, really a symptom of the breakdown of community in the UK?

I think it could be a factor.

People seem to be spending more and more time (via their phones) with their family and close friends. And consequently less and less time with the people who live nearby.

Hell. I don't think I even know the names of the people who live more than 2 doors away from me. That is shocking, isn't it? If I went and knocked on their door they would probably think I was being weird... or after something.

How did this happen, and how can we fix it?

The next time you find yourself thinking something negative about a foreigner, ask yourself if you ought to just try being a bit more friendly yourself!



(* did people with that attitude always assume foreigners were male?)

My cat died

She was nearly 12 years old.

Sooty 2005-2017

The fact that I am calling her "my cat" is quite an achievement. My wife persuaded me that we should get a cat in 2005. I was quite reluctant. There is a joke that goes:

Women love cats; men say they love cats; when women aren't looking, men kick cats.

And whilst I never actually kicked the cat, I wasn't all that keen on it for the first year or two. Note the "it" there.

Time changes people though. And she was a very sweet cat. She would often come and sit on my lap... and she hardly ever scratched me, badly.

Cats become one of those constants in your life, like the Queen. They are always there and they change so slowly that you don't notice. We had a lot of bad things happen to us, and Sooty was always a reminder of better times.

That became abundantly clear to me in 2011 when my wife died. After that, Sooty was a walking reminder of her. It was a dark time, and Sooty helped me get through it. Maybe more so than any of my human friends. A cat never says the wrong thing.

And so here we are in 2017. It was a type of cancer called lymphoma, apparently. Which spreads quickly and is incurable. At least it was over quickly; I would have hated to see her decline and suffer over a long time. I was with her when she died.

Now it is just me.

DVD Player

I've had a few DVD players and Blu-ray players. They all do odd things. 

1. Why does the player always ask me what language I speak for some disks?

The player is set up in English. Why not use English unless I go and change it? Also, it seems to be able to remember where I last watched up to if I have seen the disk before. How can it remember that and not remember the language?

It's really annoying when I pop in a disk, nip to the kitchen to get snacks, and come back expecting the ads to have finished... but the "language" menu is there instead.

2. Why do they have 2 types of menu? Menu and Pop-up Menu. At least one of these never works for any given disk. And it is impossible to guess which will work for any particular disk.

And don't even get me started on why every disk has its own style of menu... many with little icons for "play" and "setup" that mean nothing to anyone but the graphic design intern that came up with them. Galling after I selected "English" and then don't get any English words in the menu.

3. This operation is not permitted. WTF? I can't use the menu now because who says so? It's my damn player and my disk. I should be able to watch whichever bit I want at the speed I want!!!

It might seem like a good idea to "make" people watch that trailer for your new film... on a new disk. But I'm still being forced to watch trailers for films that came out years ago (many of which were shit, by the way).

Compare all this pain to the experience of watching something on Netflix... and you can see why streaming is winning. Disks will soon die out.

Bye for now

I only write on this blog when my life is too miserable to do anything else.

No doubt I will be back. But for now I'm done.

Social media is not news

I wish the BBC and newspapers here would stop reporting what people have said on social media. That is not news.

You wouldn't say in a report "X was overheard saying Y in a pub about Z" so why dignify the digital equivalent with a higher status than it deserves. 

What The Fuck 2016?

Sorry for the strong language, but it kinda seems appropriate. What is wrong with 2016? It seems like it's not enough for one of my heroes to be dying every 5 minutes... no, the democratic world seems to have gone insane.

It's not that I think people are making the wrong choices. It's that they are being presented with terrible options and then picking one in completely irrational ways.

Is this the best we can do? Come on. This is everyone's problem. Blaming other people for voting the other way wont help. And blaming people for being unhappy with the results wont help either.

We need better options. We need more options. A binary choice might seem easy, but we need people to have to think more than that. And we need leaders who can work together not fight over who is telling the bigger lies.

World, get a fucking grip, please!