I’ve been finding writing difficult recently, culminating in the “Meh” post of a couple of days ago.
I’m not quite sure why. It’s not as if there isn’t lots happening in my own life at the moment, nor are then any shortage of things in the wider world which are either engaging me or frustrating me. The problem is, if I were to start to write on most of these topics at any length, you’d find them a very dull read or I’d simply become incoherent with rage far too quickly – and so be a very dull read.
A few days ago, I couldn’t even manage to string together a whimsical post on the OU coming third in the “University Sex” league table. I knew that the average age of students was rapidly coming down at the OU, but with the scarcity of face to face tutorials and residential schools these days you have to wonder if it all isn’t simply virtual via the medium of Facebook and Skype. Either that, or it’s just students acting in the way that students always have done – making stuff up and shouting it loudly in a hopeless effort to impress.
Making stuff up, shouting it loudly and then killing people is what Eddie Izzard suggested that fascists do when I saw him in Nottingham a couple of weeks ago. Earlier on in his performance, and to an audience which seemed eerily quiet in parts, he’d also equated the rise of UKIP with fascism too. Surely there aren’t people who like Eddie Izzard that would vote UKIP? Yet this would seem to be the case. At least in Nottingham.
I really mustn’t get started on why a large number of my fellow citizens seem to believe that an isolationist lurch to the right is just what we need to get the economy back on its feet again. We all know how successful that tactic was in Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy and Galtieri’s Argentina. (Hyperinflation, anyone? No thanks, I’ll have the cake). But, for whatever reason, large swathes of the electorate either believe that it is genuinely what we need, or alternatively, that UKIP is some kind of lovely, cuddly “anti-politics” party that is a safe home for a protest vote. I don’t know which of these explanations scares me the most.
If you’re from the “UKIP are harmless, cuddly eccentrics” school of thought, you should really read this piece from the Institute of Employment Rights on UKIP in the workplace. It certainly left me speechless and very, very worried about the future if they were ever in a position to enact their policies.
I’m going back to my bunker now. I may be some time.