Quick reminder - if you want access to the paid content on Bearly Politics (Friday chats and the full archive) but money’s a bit tight at the moment, just email me at iratusursusmajor@gmail.com and I’ll sort you out with a complimentary subscription. Pensioners, students, journalists, anyone on Universal Credit - all included.
Good morning everyone.
It feels like a hell of a long time since I have done one of these, largely because it has been. As many of you know, life took a bit of a turn for me towards the end of last month with my dad passing away after quite a long illness, resulting in a very quick trip back to South Africa, which was absolutely worth doing.
It also meant pretty much a big disappearance from this scene for a good week and a half with just a post or two. On top of that, it was also my last week in the NHS. I actually missed my own farewell and my own last week, which is just one of those things, and you just sort of cope with it. But since then, I’ve also started a new job, which is based up in Manchester, even though I am very helpfully able to work from home. That said, it still has been a bit of a challenging period. So I appreciate everyone just bearing with me - see what I did there - whilst I still find my feet in this new world.
And good God, what a new world it is.
I mean, beyond the normal changes, there’s also been a bit of a week from hell. I attempted to do Manchester in one day for meetings and honestly it’s something that I would not really recommend. It is doable - but by the time I got on the train after having been up since four o’clock that morning I was just utterly exhausted and I still had a two and a half hour journey back to London before jumping on the Tube to get home.
It was chaos.
I was completely wiped out by Tuesday, and Tuesday started with an estate agent driving into our two-month-old new electric vehicle, causing not a lot of damage, but I will say a bit of significant damage nonetheless. And it did cause me to go running down from my office in what I was wearing, which was basically a pair of relatively short shorts. I am very sorry to give you that picture of my bright white thighs, as well as some slippers and a full collared shirt and tie, standing around my car negotiating with the man for his insurance details. It was an interesting scene and I do think it would have been fun to see from the outside. It was not fun whilst it was happening, but c’est la vie.
That led to me getting into a full-on war with our managing agent on Wednesday, and that sort of led into just a very large email exchange between 10 different flats, all wanting the same things and the antagonist being our managing agent who I now feel a bit sorry for, but they, to be honest, did fuck up. By yesterday, I was exhausted. But very luckily, I had my D&D night that I got to do, which has become this lovely thing that I do with three of my nearly middle-aged friends. So we’re all just playing pretend, and I cannot tell you how helpful that has been for the old mental health.
There are a couple of things that are happening in the world that are probably worth doing a bit of discussion about. The first and foremost being the war that Trump started towards the end of February. I was in South Africa at that stage and I was looking at things going, “Are we actually going to be able to get home?” Because flights all of a sudden seemed very tenuous. Very fortunately for us, we had booked through BA, so we did get home, rather uncomfortably. But it was definitely an anxiety that sat there for a while.
The whole thing kicked off when, between Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, they decided that now is the time to invade Iran. I would be the last person to defend Iran in any way or form. The regime has been pretty toxic to say the least. It’s one of the worst places in the world and I think the oppressiveness of the regime has just been getting worse over the past couple of years. So there is good reason to intervene, but you don’t do it like that. This was - it just felt like a one-man show going in. It is complete chaos.
