Today I went to the Co-op, I need not shop for another 3 weeks probably, though milk will become an issue. The floor in the Co-op was marked out in 6 foot spaces, there were notices of only two items on any purchase. The floors and the shelves were being cleaned, fairly easy as there was not much on them. Sense and sensibility prevails thank goodness. A pet shop couple lives in the next village and he will deliver in the district, there is a milkman as well. So alone in solitary splendour I will watch the world go by and hope that this turmoil for people will come to an end. I feel very sorry for America now going through a crisis of such magnitude, with a leader who should at least have his mouth washed out with soap! But, and it is an important but, there are millions of sensible people in America who will take the reins of power and do sensible things.
Have you noticed the disappearance of B***** when one calamity exceeds another? Corbyn left government yesterday, did not watch the final act but The Independent wrote a beautifully worded article on it... 'Farewell Jeremy Corbyn, it's your country now.'
"Corbyn may never have entered government, but the government is nonetheless still investigating innovative digital ways in which it might fine us if we leave our houses without permission, turning a once conspicuously consuming society into a digital panopticon. Not even in his most dystopian fantasies did George Orwell ever dare to dream so big.
Of course, the churlish among you may cling to the notion that all this has in fact been achieved not through Corbyn’s very long years of very well-paid and entirely ineffective public service, but by a bat who bit a pangolin then crapped on the floor of a Chinese market."
And if you want to know what panopticon means, which I did, it was devised by Jeremy Bentham in the 19th century.
The panopticon is a disciplinary concept brought to life in the form of a central observation tower placed within a circle of prison cells. From the tower, a guard can see every cell and inmate but the inmates can't see into the tower. Prisoners will never know whether or not they are being watched.
Food for thought, and did not Pat say something about 1984, a book I have never read because I don't like scary books, childish maybe. At the moment we need strong forces but when it is all over we need to go back to a liberal society, and laws that allow freedom of expression.
Food for thought, and did not Pat say something about 1984, a book I have never read because I don't like scary books, childish maybe. At the moment we need strong forces but when it is all over we need to go back to a liberal society, and laws that allow freedom of expression.
Don't you remember their slogan - I got it at the Co-op.
ReplyDeleteThe Co-op is strong up North, but where I came from it was Sainsbury or Somerfield, a supermarket long since eaten up by another. I support the Co-op for its ethos and charitable message, and find that shopping at Lidl, may be cheap but you can never get everything you want. My supermarket shopping unfolded!
DeleteI remember seeing it on Esther Rantzen's programme "That's Life" a long time ago, an unfortunate juxtaposition of two posters on advertising hoardings. One said something like "VD can be cured" and the other immediately beside it "I got it at the Co-op". Hope the co-op ad doesn't take on a more contemporary meaning.
DeleteAnd she is still around Esther, and a typical humorous pairing of posters. They run a fairly good ship the Co-op as long as they don't have a religious leader running the show.
DeleteI'd almost forgotten about him - the crystal Methodist.
DeleteQuite right Thelma - let's hope a better world prevails.
ReplyDeleteWell it has become a topic of discussion.
DeleteWe have the worst leaders at the worst time.
ReplyDeleteCould it be that they are grey males of a certain age? Systems have to change of course.
DeleteI could easily be called a tree hugging liberal, yet I must say I am pleased at at strong leadership at most state levels, and the very few in DC who stand up to the tyrant. At least someone convinced him to stop calling it the China Virus, in light of how many Asian Americans go to the polls.
ReplyDeleteWeirdly the world has come to a halt because of a virus, it has turned the world of your leader upside down, he flounders like a seal in a bath. Hopefully he won't get another term in office.
ReplyDeleteWe have to hope for better things to come or we don't have anything else left to hope for.
ReplyDeletePerhaps something good will come out of it. For instance the difference between public and private services. Food after all is a very essential commodity, but lies on the side of private enterprise. Rishi Sunak has opted to support the wages of the working people already undermining the Conservative dog eat dog approach, a fresh and humanistic way to tackle a problem, he is not obviously demonised by the class system that exists in this country.
DeleteIn lieu of your ailing cooker and inability to get the bread maker, there's the Remoska cooker - not cheap, but you can cook lots in it, including bread .. .
ReplyDeleteSorry - it's taken me a couple of days to remember what it was called!
ReplyDeleteThank you Jennie, I will put it on my list. Intrigued by the fact that when bread needs a hot oven to rise in, how does a slow cooker work with less heat...It sounds very Russian by the way Remoska.
DeleteUnlike that other Tory clown - Cameron, Mr Corbyn will not ensconce himself in an Oxfordshire shepherd's hut to write a tiresome and self-congratulatory autobiography. He will keep on doing what he has always done - representing his constituents and fighting for social justice. It wasn't Johnson that defeated him last December but the mind-boggling mantra, "Get Brexit Done!" and the vindictiveness of our right wing media. I applaud Mr Corbyn for bravely maintaining his position as leader pending the arrival of his successor. That took guts. By the way what happened to anti-semitism? We don't hear anything about that now.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that all his life Corbyn was a political activist, he was brought down by a slander campaign, something of which the Conservatives are good at. This country does not like 'left' thinking and his war cry 'for the many, not the few' frightened the middle classes. It is a shame that he left parliament with little acknowledgement of his genuine hard work for causes, especially peace. The problem is if you don't have the media behind you, there is a tendency too flounder in the mud slinging that the conservatives put up. My question would be of him, what would he have done in the current crisis? 'Get Brexit Done', just shows up the stupidity of slogans and the inability of the masses to read the hard stuff.
ReplyDelete