As a mark of self-respect, I've managed since 08/09/2022 to avoid the onslaught of the televised mourn-hub. I've also avoided posting anything remotely related to it all on Facebook or Twitter, as well as here. Until today, when my Mum came around for Sunday dinner. It's fair to say that my Mum does not share any of my political beliefs, thinks GB News is better than the BBC because it's 'not biased', and thinks the Royals are fascinating. The TV inevitably ended up showing the endless stream of 'mourners' filing past a flag-draped box, along with hilariously dressed military changing guard every twenty minutes or so in a clockwork Trumpton fashion. Whilst this was on, we naturally ended up in some debates of no consequence. Like, for example, "what period are we in now the 'Elizabethan era' has ended?". I pointed out that we had not just exited the Elizabethan era, in the sense that such things are generally used with historical perspective - a longer perspective than a week or so. Whilst Googling 'Elizabethan era', amongst the default questions was "What was life like in the Elizabethan era". The answer: "It included a small but powerful population of wealthy nobles, a prospering middle class, and a large and impoverished lower class living in miserable conditions". At which point I conceded that we certainly had been living in the Elizabethan era.
Meanwhile, Less Trust has had the easiest week of no-scrutiny imaginable after being voted in as PM by a tiny fraction of the population. When we come out of this cloud of public woe, perhaps later this month, I expect she will make Thatcher look like a 'woke lefty' and Johnson look competent.
On my way home from buying the components for our roast dinner today, I took a very quick detour to a side road into an industrial estate in Whetstone alongside the M1. I knew there were a few Sycamores along there, and I was looking for a leaf mine I'd not seen yet. It didn't take long to find a few, including one tenanted on the same leaf as a vacated mine:
