by I’ve just had a longish Skype chat with my cousin who lives in New York state (I stayed with him in 2015) but is currently in northern Italy. It’s always good to catch up with him.
We’re getting scorching weather again. We’re forecast to nudge 40 in the coming days. I’d planned another road trip, but I won’t even want to travel outside this air-conditioned room if it’s like that. I’m now thinking of making a trip to Slovenia in the next few weeks, then I’ll probably spend a few days in the UK in the second half of August before going to Vienna from 29th August to 2nd September.
Last night I played tennis with Florin. I wasn’t very good. I led 3-0 and 4-1 but yet again we found ourselves at 6-6. I came from 3-0 down to win the tie-break 7-5. He won more points in the set; tennis is very first-past-the-post-y. We played to the sounds of Festivalul Inimilor, the festival of traditional music from many nationalities that takes place in Parcul Rozelor every July. It’s completely free, and after the game I grabbed a beer from one of the stalls and watched some of it. In the good old days, the musicians would parade past my apartment block, Olympics-style, to mark the start of it all. They still do that but I no longer live there. I really miss those early days.
Lately I’ve been lacking motivation and the capacity to enjoy things. I met Dorothy yesterday at Prospero, the bakery close to where I used to live that also serves coffee. It was my suggestion to go there; they always did very good bread. The place was packed with intimidatingly sophisticated women with perfect hair and matching handbags and jackets even on such a hot day; there were separate queues that made the ordering process painful. (When I’m on my own I find a simple little bar or a vending machine. It’s cheaper and I beat all that stress.) Things were fine once we eventually sat down.
We talked a lot about the UK election. Unlike me, she stayed up half the night to watch it. I wanted to upload a graph showing the huge disparity between vote share and seat share and how ridiculous it is, but WordPress isn’t allowing me to upload any pictures at all for some reason that is well beyond my understanding.
Ed Davey’s novel strategy of falling off paddleboards and screaming “Vote Liberal Democrat!” mid-bungee jump paid off, in terms of seats at least. It got him out there, and he used his frivolous stunts to make a serious point about social care; he has a disabled son who has to be looked after day and night. Good on him.
Dorothy said the Lib Dems (12% of the vote) were too woke. Dad said Labour (34%) were too woke. The Greens got 6%, and they’re obviously very woke. By my calculations, that’s a majority who voted for these woke parties. What that means that is most people under 70 don’t give a damn about wokeness or unwokeness and have more pressing issues like heating their homes and feeding their kids and seeing a doctor when they need one. Dad said the state of Britain is hardly the Tories’ fault – they didn’t create Covid or start the war in Ukraine. I said, no, it bloody is their fault. Institutions in and around London have got richer while the poor have continued to get poorer. They’ve caused that. Dad agreed with me.
The Tories were rejected wholesale by the young and the not-so-young. It’s only when you get to properly old that their vote held up, saving the party from total oblivion. The baby boomers have had their own way politically for a very long time. This time they didn’t. That can only be a good thing.
Some more good news is that the incoming government is much more serious than the old one. This is a moment in history that calls for seriousness. Much of that is down to Labour ministers coming from far less privileged backgrounds than their predecessors. “Born to rule” is hopefully dead.
None of this will be easy. They aren’t even talking about the environment or mental health, both massive issues. And where’s the money? They’ve kept quiet about raising taxes but surely they will have to. Then there’s the business of getting people engaged in politics at all. People have had enough. My brother voted at 8pm, two hours before polls closed, and was shocked by how few ticks there were on the list as his name was checked off.
One last thing: I bought a bike on Thursday. It’s German and far more modern than my previous ones. I guess you’d call it a hybrid: half mountain bike, half road bike. It’s got a dizzying number of gears. Why I need more than four or five I have no idea. The brand is Steppenwolf, which I thought was just the name of a band. I’ve now got two old bikes I somehow need to offload.
I’ll try not to write again for a few days.
