by I’m on the Eurostar, the second of five trains that will, I hope, get me to Timișoara. Travelling by train is bloody great. I think I could do this for weeks. My journey started with an early morning bus ride from St Ives to Cambridge. We just managed to avoid a protest in Cambridge that would have probably caused me to miss my train to London. Public transport in the UK is a much bigger deal than it ever is in New Zealand. Several times already I’ve been on a packed bus or train and one of the passengers has shouted a command: to vacate seats for elderly passengers or move down the carriage. The experience, which really can be cramped at times, has an almost military feel about it.
As I got a coffee at St Pancras I got a rare look “behind the scenes” at the café’s so-called Happy Board. The company had four values: Integrity, Freshness, Collaboration and something beginning with E that has slipped my mind. Ah, Excellence, of course. Employees’ ratings were posted on the Happy Board in columns of ticks and crosses. Next to Alex’s scores was a message in purple: “Not good enough Alex! Retrain!” This is 2016 so I’m guessing Alex has a 2:1 in psychology (or something) from a good university.
I watched the speech that Theresa May gave yesterday at the Tory party conference. It was compelling, and signalled the end of neoliberalism that has been part of British politics since I was born. I’ve never known anything else. Whether any of what May talked about actually materialises is another matter, and there was precious little policy in the speech anyway. For the foreseeable future the EU exit (which didn’t need to happen to move away from neoliberalism) will dominate.
On Tuesday night I dropped in on some friends of my parents who have lived in the same house, on the street I grew up in, since 1978. I like them. We must have chatted for two hours. It was an extremely cosmopolitan street back then: they said that it had a reputation for being “where the wogs and hippies live”. They still live a fairly alternative lifestyle all these decades later, and have always just made ends meet by running a craft shop in town. They voted to remain and said they felt numb at the result. The referendum brought out some very strong emotions in people that you rarely see even at a general election.
Yesterday I figured out where all the interesting British clothes have gone. They’re in charity shops, of which St Ives has at least six. I’ll definitely try and pick up some bargains the next time I’m in the UK.
The sun is shining and I’m whistling through northern France at 300 km an hour. Yeah man, this my happy place.
