Well, the weather out here in SW France has officially lost the plot. We’ve gone from a 35 degree heatwave to highs of 18 degrees and torrential rain. Hell, we even had the fire lit at the weekend – something that’s never happened before in July. The rain I will admit we needed, but a return to some summer sunshine would now be very welcome. The confusion is due to continue this week too. Its cool and cloudy today and we’re in sweaters. On Wednesday it’s going to reach 32 for a day and then we’re going to be hit with another storm, with more greyness and rain to follow.
The cats are thoroughly bemused by all this and are spending far too much time indoors. Louis is intolerable, waking us up every day at dawn. Smeagol is calmer, but surpassingly lazy. He surprised us upon our return from holiday: he’d visibly lost weight. In fact, he looked better than he had done for years: all sleek and svelte. He’d obviously been out running around in the sun instead of moping around the house as he does when we are around. Unfortunately, since our return he’s more than stacked it all back on again.
We’ve both been busy with work this last week. Matt’s finally put live his bête noire website but is still ironing out numerous bugs. After that he has several other projects waiting for him. I only have the one confirmed project on the go – for a friend of ours, Emmanuel. He started up a company about about 18 months ago that buys up derelict buildings in city centres and converts them into apartments. They have an existing website that is truly awful, so my job is to do it what they do to old buildings and transform it into something presentable. I submitted my design to them at the end of the week and am now waiting to hear back.
Nothing else noteworthy happened all week, so onto the weekend. It was curry night on Friday and we invited Manu & Mathilde over to ours. We also invited Philippe, but got no answer, and Jenny, but doubted we’d hear from her as this is her busy season. In the end, it turned out that Jenny was free and she brought Sam and another friend of hers called Emmanuelle with her. Philippe also turned out to be free at the last moment so there were 8 of us to dinner in the end.
It was a good fun evening, but Philippe did his usual trick of getting too drunk and talking rubbish about war, communism, Europe, ISIS and all his other favourite drunken-rant topics. He’s a Mélenchon supporter and is not a fan of France’s current President. Luckily, he was also tired and the worse for wear from the previous evening, so he didn’t overstay his welcome.
In other news, my parents finally have a completion date for their house out here: 18th of July – a full six months since they put in their offer. The delay was caused by a comedy of inefficiencies of the sort that only the French could muster. However, I’m pleased that there’s progress at last. Less pleasing is that due to work commitments, Mum can’t make it over that week. Dad is able to do so and will sign on her behalf so we kept the date, but it’s a bugger that we wont get to see Mum this time. Dad’s out here for a week and as well as signing the acte de vente, we’re also going to get the house insured, open a bank account, and meet various tradesmen for quotes so that work on the renovations can finally get underway.
What with everything else going on, I haven’t had a chance to rant on here about the ever-worsening state of the United Kingdom, and I have much to say. First, our last general election, where the Tories managed to quite gloriously snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and convert a slender majority into a hung parliament. They damn-near lost an unlosable election by running a campaign so bad, it almost seemed intentional. It then took them nearly three weeks to finalise a deal with the DUP* to allow them to continue to function (for want of a better word) as a government. This deal involved a staggering £1bn bribe. The DUP has 10 MPs, for which the Tories are essentially paying £100m each so they can cling on to power. Words fail.
I was initially overjoyed at the election result: a rejection of Theresa May being by default also a rejection of her extreme vision for Brexit. Poll after poll now show that support for leaving the EU is dwindling amongst the UK public, and the election has filled parliament with a substantial pro-EU majority. All the ingredients are there to mount a counter-attack on Brexit. But sadly for the UK, there’s one major obstacle, and his name is Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the opposing Labour party.
In the public’s eyes, Corbyn went into the election as Clark Kent and emerged as Superman. He’s now worshipped as a hero of the people. The only problem with this is that he despises the EU and is as keen as the Tories to pull the UK out. In defiance of the current public mood, and in defiance of his own party’s values, he is forcing Labour to capitulate to the Tories at every turn to ensure a hard brexit.
It’s one thing for him to pursue Brexit for his own ideological ends, but what gets me is the cynical way he does it. He calls the Tory plan “extreme” and promises his version will protect jobs and investment in the UK. But he is pursuing the exact same brexit as Theresa May: a total break with the EU, the Single Market and the Customs Union. It makes my blood boil. Corbyn’s surprising electoral success was in large part due to the youth vote. The under 35s are 85% remain and voted for him as a rejection of a hard brexit. He will be made to pay for this disingenuousness come the next election – which is likely to be sooner rather than later given the fragility of the current “government”.
Meanwhile, brexit rolls on and the country continues to tear itself apart. The UK economy is currently the worst performing in the world. Staff shortages across a broad range of industries are starting to bite, most notably at the crisis-riven NHS which has always depended on the EU for nurses. More generally, a third of EU workers in the UK are planning to leave, many of them high-skilled. Our reputation internationally is shot to pieces. Newspaper articles the world over oscillate between wondering what the hell’s going on with us and just plain ridiculing us. And we haven’t even left yet…
*The Democratic Unionist Party, for those that don’t know, is the only party in Westminster that has less of a grip on reality than the Tories. Whereas May and co. would like to roll the clock back to the 1950s, the DUP would be happier in the Victorian era. A party of ferociously homophobic, anti-abortion, creationist, climate-change deniers now has a pivotal role in UK government. Against a more sane backdrop, this might provoke some outrage, but with the way things are, it’s just one small aspect of a giant clusterf**k of a situation and it barely registers.