Soilman

O frabjous day! Callooh Callay! It stopped raining!

We have an extraordinary 48-hr sunshine window. Can’t pretend it’s warm – 14C max – but at least it’s not pissing. I’ve enjoyed the first productive gardening day in a month.

The cauliflowers are in, and even the asparagus has appeared. At last. Not in time to save the UK asparagus festival, but better late than never.

Jeez, but things look and feel so different in the sunshine. One sees proper colours again, the way God intended… not the washed out, bleached, deathly pallor of life under leaden skies.

We’re back to rain on Monday, but the break has felt like a holiday.

I’m building a fucking ark.

PS I’m having a Spring clean of the site, which includes my blogroll. Any site that’s been inactive for more than a year will be deleted I’m afraid – I’ve already removed a few. At the end of May, I’ll be deleting anything that’s been inactive for six months or more. So if that’s you, and you wanna keep a link on my site – get posting!

Wouldn’t it be great if it, like, stopped raining?

I know. Hard to imagine. In the part of the country where I live, the sun has absented itself now for – what? – about 11 months. Seriously. The last warm, sunny days were in early June last year. Since then, it’s been gloom and rain non-stop.

Although I’m used to this – Brits are all used to this – I don’t find it any easier. In fact, I reckon it’s harder. Folks from warmer climes often enjoy the novelty of cool cloud and rain. I’m to the manner born… so I’m fed up to the back teeth.

This is why UK citizens will do anything – really, anything – to get a bit of sun. Holiday in Syria? Sure, great. Sod the bullets. Just gimme some rays.

I’m reduced to germinating my sweetcorn in the house. It’s not even warm enough in the greenhouse.

God give me strength. And please, please, please… stop this fucking rain.

Because I can’t garden at the moment (too wet), I have time to think. Always dangerous.

In particular, I’m thinking about China. And I’m not liking it.

Today, a Chinese company bought a controlling stake in an old and much-loved British cereal brand. No doubt this is good for the company. It may even be good for UK jobs (though – call me a cynic – I doubt it).

A fairly unremarkable thing, on its own. But taken with the current Chen Guangchen story, and western nations’ general pusillanimity where China is concerned, it sends a shiver down my spine.

Napoleon was right: China has awoken, and the world is fucking trembling. Not in a good way, sadly. I’ve been to China, and I gotta tell ya: I didn’t like what I saw, and heard, and felt. Chinese people are delightful and charming. Their country’s politics, and some of its cultural precepts, utterly suck.

None of us can afford to ignore this, or wish it away – not any more. The unpalatable truth is that China’s economic power is so enormous that its tendrils are reaching far into our lives – wherever we live. In financial terms, China more or less owns the USA at this point. Chinese managers (and thus Chinese politicians) may already own the firm where you work.

Which means Chinese politics and Chinese culture are coming to your life – soon – wherever you are. Chen Guangchen is not some odd blind guy in a far away land with no relevance to you. In a very real sense, he IS you.

You may not be worried. Maybe you’re even ranting, as you read this, about western cultural imperialism and the terrible damage western nations did to China not so very long ago. In which case you have a point. We have much to be ashamed of.

But don’t rant too long, or too ardently. Above all, don’t be a fucking idiot and equate our sins with theirs as if there were some genuine moral/political equivalence.

Ask yourself merely this: How many Americans are queueing at the Chinese embassy in Washington asking for political asylum? Has that happened ever…. even just once?

[Postscript: This post may well condemn soilman.net to a co-ordinated hack, or at the very least a denial-of-service attack. This is how China deals with views it doesn't like – within and without its borders. If so, thanks for listening... and you know who done it]

PS Since I’m on the subject, I’d like to note here formally that I value my membership of the anglo-saxon political club higher every day. However often we fail to reach them, we set the highest standards for human dignity and liberty the world has ever seen. In particular, I admire beyond measure the constitution of the USA. Just knowing that it exists, somewhere over the Atlantic, as a last refuge for lovers of freedom – whatever happens – helps me sleep easier.

Apologies for total silence on these pages. Reason: Some moron made the predictable error of claiming Britain was facing a terrible drought, and might face water rationing for years.

Consequence: The wettest April since records began. I’ve hardly been able to set foot outside for three weeks.

They really should know better. Look up the name Dennis Howell and learn from history.

Because they’re mostly morons, human beings forget that there is no such thing as an average year. No year is ever average. It’s above average in certain indices (sometimes well above) or below average (ditto). The average is an approximate halfway point between the normal extremes.

Sure, we’ve had two dry winters. But the year I moved into my my current home, the lawn was underwater from November until February. It will be that way again sooner or later. Probably – because of the law of averages – sooner.

“Disgruntled, disillusioned and disengaged” – that’s the UK population’s attitude to politics, according to a survey published today.

No surprises there. Even the most moronic UK citizen has begun to notice that whomever we elect, nothing changes. We get the same attitudes, the same assumptions and the same basic policies regardless who’s in power. It’s a phenomenon that began in about 1986 and has gathered steam ever since.

Reflecting on this today, I wondered what a different politics would look like: an honest politics.

God knows, I’m no fan of politicians, but I do sympathise with their basic dilemma: If they told us the truth about the state of our nation, and what they intend to do, we’d never elect them. When they don’t (because they can’t), we accuse them of lying and become ‘disillusioned, disgruntled”…. etc.

You’re going to be poorer and pay more tax – much more tax

Here’s the ‘truth’ manifesto for any politician standing for election in the UK today:

• We’re going to tax the hell out of you. No choice, pal: the government’s bust.
• You’re gonna see a shit load of colleagues, friends and family lose their jobs. If you’re ‘lucky’ enough to keep yours, you’ll be paying for them – cos the state can’t afford to.
• See above. The welfare benefits you’ve taken for granted all these years are on the way out. Enjoy what’s left of ‘em while you can.
• Your costs are gonna soar. Fuel, basic foodstuffs, you name it… it’s all getting pricier.
• It’s very likely that you’ll die in poverty: Pensions are utterly fucked and getting more fucked as people live longer. Plus any savings you’ve put away are going to be destroyed by inflation. Why? Because inflation’s the least painful option for reducing our debt mountain. In the end, it’s the only possible ‘solution’.
• The ‘end of the recession’ is a fairy tale to keep your spirits up. There won’t be an ‘end’ to this recession: it’s the beginning of the end of western dominance. To compete with the emerging economies, we’re going to have to permanently pare back our expectations and our living standards. Deal with it.
• Your children are going to be significantly poorer than you. Deal with that, too.

Not a vote-winner, is it? But it’s the truth.

Remember that next time you’re slagging off a politician for being a slimy, lying sonofabitch. All he did, when you elected him, was tell you what you want to hear.

I always find this effect vaguely amusing. As onion sets start to sprout, the outer skin often detaches itself and ends up sitting on the new shoot like a bishop’s mitre.

The onions are loving the deluge; this time last year I was frantically watering them – daily – to ensure they rooted. This year they’re drowning.

PS Many thanks to all for kind words in response to last post. I’ve pulled myself together and will try not to moan so much…

PPS Looks like a good year to test my theory about downy mildew on onions. I reckon cold, damp weather in early season is the cause. So 2012 should be a bumper mildew year.

*groans*

Unhappiness is tricky, isn’t it?

I mean, you never know quite what to do with it. Do you whinge endlessly about the cause(s), hoping for some miraculous catharsis through repetitio ad nauseam? Do you become angry and bitter, insulting and hurting everyone around you, perhaps expecting the same result? Do you recklessly change significant things in your life – home, relationships, career – hoping to leave the cause(s) far behind in what recovering addicts call a ‘geographical’?

Or do you bottle it up, fit a tight stopper, watch it progressively kill all the joy in your life as its pressurised poison seeps out into everything you love… and wait to die of bowel cancer and/or heart disease in 5-15 years (my personal favourite)?

Like all human beings from time to time, I’m wrestling with this old problem again. Don’t get me wrong: I have no serious reason to be unhappy. Nobody’s died. I have food and a roof over my head. My problems are trivial.

But unhappiness doesn’t scale particularly well. When it’s living in your head, it’s like having an Icelandic heavy rock band practising in your attic 24/7. The noise can’t be ignored. It can’t be put into perspective.

No matter that the rockers will be gone by Tuesday, or that they could be using three amplifiers, not one. Misery is unresponsive to comparative analysis. It only exists at level 10 out of 10. Or, more usually, 11 out of 10.

The ‘solution’ – find the root problem and fix it – is always the same. But getting there is always so very, very hard. It usually involves doing things that are courageous, difficult and/or painful to oneself and others. Sacrifice is often involved.

I guess I’ll get there. Wherever ‘there’ turns out to be, this time.

In the meantime: Sorry for lack of gardening updates.

They came in the post Friday pm (variety: Cambridge Favourite), so today I hoiked ‘em in. God knows if I’ve done it right. Never even seen a bare-root strawberry before. I just buried the roots and left the crown above the soil, then gave them a good watering.

This will work… right?

In other news, the onion sets are now planted as well (click the thumbnail to enlarge). I had to water them in, incredibly. The ground is so dry – already – that clouds of dust fly up the moment you put a spade in.

God knows what it will be like come July. But obviously, being me, I fear the worst.

A follow-up to my post about the riots last summer.

The reports I predicted have indeed been written and are now being duly published – with the conclusions I wearily forecast.

As was crystal clear, already, in August:

• Nobody was really to blame
• Everyone involved was tragically deprived and pitiable
• We need to spend more money on educating and assimilating these tragic, deprived persons. And giving them a ‘stake in society’

Just to remind you of the next steps in this very British charade:

1. The sums required to genuinely educate, assimilate and incentivise the pitiable ones to become less, er, pitiable will be found to be so vast that the electorate will refuse to pay

2. The pitiable ones don’t want education and opportunities anyway. They just want the stuff… ergo, we’ll spend a few million quid on youth centres and ‘opportunity’ programmes in our conurbations and a couple of thousand non-jobs to oversee them and the recipients of our (cheap and inadequate) largesse

3. Within 15 years, even that will have dwindled away and the riots will start afresh

Maybe you have to reach your 40s to see and understand these things – it takes a generation and a half for history to start repeating itself before your eyes. How much more depressing must this be for folks in their 70s and 80s, who are seeing the same bullshit lies coming round for the third or fourth time in their lives?