Thoughts for our US friends, from the “sneering liberal elite” (as apparently we now are) of the UK. We’re a few months ahead of you in trying to work out why our country has taken the ‘Samson’ route of pulling down the temple whilst standing inside it (there will be more on that), and we’re starting to see how the stages of bereavement from principle and reason play out. This isn’t entirely serious – it’s a play on Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s long-discredited model for the stages of grief, nor is the language safe for those of a nervous disposition but, for all that, it’s been well received…
Apocalypse Now vs Yes, Minister
Yes, we’re screwed. And we’ve done it to ourselves. But it isn’t over yet, not by a long chalk, baguette or würst. And there are so many factors and factions in play that attempting any firm predictions would be an act of senseless and misdirected hubris. Rather like the referendum itself. But there are a couple of semi-logically consistent scenarios that could play out and a few key decisions and tipping points that would make one or the other more likely. So, without further ado… Continue reading Apocalypse Now vs Yes, Minister
Illusions of Independence
For those voting for Brexit on the ‘it can’t get any worse’ principle, don’t you believe it. It can, it will and it already is: the uncertainty around the outcome is already impacting the pound, the markets and investment in the UK. An actual Brexit vote would accelerate that immeasurably. You’d like a little certainty about your future in an increasingly uncertain world. I get that. But the contradiction here is that voting us out of the institution that does most to facilitate trade and protect workers’ rights would only achieve greater uncertainty. This world is not that of your grandparents but an ever-developing tapestry of trade between nations and blocs, the dynamic of which is part of the warp and weft of society and the generation of the wealth that keeps us going. If you try to unpick the part of that fabric labelled ‘Britain‘, the whole thing starts to unravel and everyone suffers, not just the UK. There is not (and never was) a mythical Little England to retreat to and, if you try to make it so, you will discover this, in the hardest possible way. A Brexit would emphatically not be a ‘Victory for the common man’, it would be playing directly into the hands of those self-serving demagogues whose only interest is to profit from disunity, from corruption and from the demonising of the innocent.
Deflecting Blame: Britain, Bureaucracy & the EU
So much of the agitation for a Leave vote in June seems to be in the fond (as in, “absurd, foolish“) belief by some that a Brexit would return us to a mythic age of independence and freedom from bureaucracy. Well, here’s some news for them: they simply don’t understand either the modern world or the very British ability to bureaucratise a good idea into something completely untenable and then blame it on someone else. Here, the EU is an appartchik’s godsend: the ability to create pointless process that does nothing but perpetuate the salaries of those involved and then be able to duck responsibility by saying, “It’s the EU’s fault“. No, in this case it isn’t and we really need to remind ourselves that there’s a tolerable correlation between those parts of the world known for overweening bureaucracy and those bits of it that used to be coloured pink. Continue reading Deflecting Blame: Britain, Bureaucracy & the EU
Evening on the Loch
A solitary canoeist was enjoying himself this evening, powering his way up Loch Voil into a golden sunset. He rounded a headland, to see a large bloke lying prone on the shore, pointing a camera and long lens across the loch. At the other end of the scene, a Black-Throated Diver is floating serenely on the water.
The Darker Side of Rewilding
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of rewilding: of restoring impoverished habitats and reintroducing species that we’ve intentionally or carelessly wiped out over the millennia. Re-establishing diverse, self-maintaining and resilient ecosystems can only help us weather the storms of anthropogenic climate change as well as reduce our species’ footprint on the planet. So I’m generally pro-Beaver, pro-Lynx, pro-raptor and, lest we forget, pro-random-small-but-useful arthropods. I’ve also previously noted that the re-introduction of wolves and bears would help simultaneously solve multiple local environmental and social issues, which itself is a metric for a successful re-introduction.
The Whatness of Where
This is for the couriers, media (including the BBC) and assorted others who have no idea what this part of the world is called or where, specifically, Balquhidder is. Although it’s entirely true that they do have no idea, they’re not helped when they do try to find out, thanks to multiple and mutually contradictory databases. So we don’t get so much lost as regularly misplaced. Mis-spelling we take for granted.
The Bookshelf Constant
It is an invariant law of the universe that books expand to fill the space allocated to them, plus ten percent. I call this The Bookshelf Constant. You can’t outwit this any more than you can gravity and it is entirely independent of how many books and bookshelves you buy.
Tweedageddon
The Royal Highland Show is the third largest ticketed event in Scotland, after the Edinburgh Festivals and T in the Park. It has been an annual event for nearly two hundred years and now exists as a four-day celebration of the cultural collision between acres of tweed, forests of wellington boots and great steaming piles of manure, all worn or produced by attendees from a wide range of species. It is, definitively and definingly, Country.
Streetfighting Cheese
We’re all familiar with willingly suspending our critical faculties whilst on holiday. At such times we’ll cheerfully throw the sort of liquid down our throats that we’d normally reserve for drain cleaning, consume ‘delicacies’ that probably contravene several Geneva conventions and dance badly to music that would otherwise have us harumphing into our gin & tonics at the bar.