Faltering at the Final Hurdle ...

I’m finding it hard to keep up the momentum this week on all fronts. I’ve retreated to my bedroom at silly hours, like eight o'clock to read fiction. Its election day tomorrow and I feel intensely gloomy and despairing. People who know me know that I can get like this sometimes so it’s not necessarily the possibility that we might wake on Friday morning to find we have a Tory government. It’s not in anticipation of the ‘mythic’ hung parliament. No, we've had a coalition government in Scotland for a while now and we are doing all right. This moment of introspection isn’t even because I’m undecided. It’s more to do with the insistent, probing question that faces me in the darkest hours. And the question is this: ‘what is the bloody point?’

Damned self-indulgence I know but I can’t shift a mood that feels like a huge heavy bird has swooped down, propped a claw on each of my shoulders, spread its wings and cast shadows over everything. ‘What is the bloody point?’ In these final hours, I am not filled with the possibility that this country will endure great change, for there is no leader of the three spirited enough to instill the confidence, let alone inspire it.

But I will vote tomorrow for the countless Suffragettes and Suffragists who fought so hard for my right to put a cross on the ballot paper.

These women obviously felt there was a point ...

Image from guardian.co.uk. Photograph The National Archives

I’ll do it alone, for the year I suffered through Higher History where the struggle for the Votes for Women was met with sneers and indignation from the boys in the classroom. I did get my own back - I was the only one of the lot to get an ‘A’. So much for history.

But still I wonder, what would the Suffragettes have made of this three party race pantomime headed up exclusively by men, flanked by their good dutiful wives ...

How Beastly the Politicians Are.

Am I the only person who felt that David Cameron was putting out strange subliminal messages about the vast majority of people in this country whom he seemingly mistrusts, resents and fears on tonight’s election debate? For, while he argues that we must get the benefits scroungers back into work, he makes no concessions for the legitimately unemployed. Yes that’s right Cameron they do exist even in the country that you love. These are the millions of young people with degrees who simply cannot find work in their chosen professions or the sections of the workforce made redundant during the recession. And what of this work that each leader speaks? Where are these jobs? Who shall create them when there are impending cuts to be made in the public sector? Cameron conducted himself like a headmaster chastising the naughty boys and girls of Britain for not working hard enough or following the rules. How much could he ever possibly know about the lives of those who live on the margins? I suspect that the majority of people in this country do not choose to be poor. They do not choose to be socially isolated. They do not choose to be made redundant. They do not choose to live vulnerably. This was a country once proud of its welfare state. Whatever happened to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’?

I think an extract from DH Lawrence is apt, although I fear it comes a little too late ...


How beastly the bourgeois is
Especially the male of the species-

Presentable, eminently presentable-
shall I make you a present of him?

Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it god’s own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the thing?

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another man’s need,
Let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face him with a new
demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species-

(How Beastly the Bourgeois Is D H Lawrence, The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol 2)