Wells - Dithering capital of Britain (Warning: Rant)
I'm through with driving in Wells. I really am. The fannying about at junctions is just beyond the pale now.
"Ooooohhh....should I go left or right, or right or left?? I don't know Margaret what do you think?"
...as the green goes to flashing amber.
Or someone twiddling their bits - 30 seconds of onanism at the lights - just can't help yourself can you?
I just don't get it. People who dither like this (cue monstrously reductive generalisation...) are invariably in micro minis or SUVs, looking to park, not reading signs, not paying attention and running through red traffic lights, or just stopping randomly.
Balls to 'mirror - signal - manoeuvre'. Any form of adherence to the Highway Code is a sign of weakness.
Well I've had enough, okay?
I'm through with your private school mummy or daddy holding up the traffic to drop Chlamydia and Ptolemy right at the school gates in your SUV castle of entitled arrogance, or trying to park your spotless giant 4x4 you insist on owning - presumably because everyone in your upwardly mobile set has one - which has never even taken a B-road, into a hospital car parking bay and taking forever to park the thing, then you can't get out because the car's too wide.
Fuck fuck fuck.
You scum!!!!
Then you drive out of Wells and you're on an A-road all of which are single lane and for the best part impossible to overtake on, and the speed limit is 60MPH and there's someone up ahead in one these cars and they're holding everyone up doing 38MPH.
And you're stuck for miles, and the miles feel like a slow descent to hell.
And don't get me started on cyclists going the wrong way up the one way High Street. Their time will come.
Oh yes.
Their time will come.
And ...breathe...
Love me!
It’s a strange thing, but in some odd fantasy I imagine some of the popular kids at school get FTD or other rare dementias and join me on here and we become friends as I can help them and we also now have something in common.
Pathetic or what? Then I wake up and think, nah, fuck 'em.
Weird thing is the people I had beef with or who had beef with me, if I met them now on a superficial level at least, I'm sure we would get on. But when you do meet people from your past, it's as though you pick up that unique group dynamic when you last left off.
The Hollywood director is still the class prat to us and the butt of friendly jibes.
The alpha male is now seen as a bit of a narcissist whose high opinion of himself is now reacted to with surreptitious smirks.
The paranoid one who was funny but volatile we now see as quite unhinged.
It's very easy to break back into those roles, or to suddenly have one's eyes opened with the wisdom of our years, to see someone for who they are, not who we thought they were.
As I've said before, I was not the easiest of people when I was younger. When I met J I was feeling pretty good - calm and kind, I like to think. I got ill a few years later and those dials of my character got moved around (think of your nan trying to find the volume control on an old cathode ray TV set, but moving everything else instead so the picture is now too contrasty, too brilliant, lacking in colour and way too loud) and well, the rest is history.
I know it can be difficult to think of your nan fiddling with nobs but I digress...
Why do I crave people's approval? I guess it all comes back to being socially awkward and wanting to fit in and be popular. It's also much easier when people are being kind and accommodating with each other as I'm not good at conflict.
Pathetic or what?
Aren't we all, Deirdre? Aren't we all...
Recent purchase
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| They go with absolutely everything |
Timmy Mallet goes to Pride. I love them. They're so out there that they really do go with nothing and at the same time (dualism) go with everything. I wear them with jeans, t-shirt and a buff on my head. I look like a court jester, with my big curly 'tache. It's a look I'm rocking.
Dress how you want - balls to convention.
Life's too short innit?
Music
When I lived in London I got tickets to go and see Louis Cole live. I looked up the venue on YouTube and saw his last concert there. There he was playing this incredible music, with superb musicians and singers, and the crowd of people were just talking all the way through it.
They were just there for a social occasion - oblivious to the amazing music. I decided I wouldn't go as with FTD I may have gone ballistic at them (this was pre-Sertraline) and get thrown out after headbutting them like dominos.
An ex of mine told me she went to see her idol Stevie Wonder in Hyde Park, London. It was probably one of the last gigs he'd ever do and people were just talking all the way through it.
He's a living legend FFS!
Another phenomenon is people filming everything on their smartphones. So instead of taking in the entire concert in the present, you're instead being a videographer. Now, that's a different thing to being an audience member. All you end up with is a messy audio and the back of people's heads.
There have been altercations in West end shows as people have come in drunk and have acted disgracefully (a bit like in Shakespeare's time).
I've gone to art-house cinemas and even there there are grown adults in the back row on their smartphones - you can see the lights of the screen in your peripheral vision.
We seem to be becoming entirely REactive as a species - and it's all down to the addictive nature of social media.
Here's an interesting video by musician and producer RIck Beato on the subject:
Goodbye venal 5th-rater scum, hello new government.
However, thanks to our bizarre electoral system, Labour received just 34% of the national vote = 67% of the seats. The worst served were the Reform Party who received 18% of the votes and got 5 MPs or just under 1% of the entire House of Commons.
(Sheds crocodile tear...)
Most Lib Dems ever - if you count them as the old Liberal Party, the most seats for 100 years or so. We went LibDem here, thank goodness.
The centre and left ganged up against the hard right in France to stop Le Pen.
I'm interested in what happens now to the Conservative Party and the battle which will ensue. There are so many factions - did they lose because they weren't right wing enough? Or was it that the public had had enough of 14 years of a tanking economy compounded by the disaster that is Brexit, George Osborne's austerity for the poor, foodbanks, May's failure, Johnson's lies and deceit, partying during lockdown while his plutocrat buddies crammed their pockets full of taxpayers' money in order to deliver pisspoor PPE; Truss's disastrous 45 day premiership and the billions lost in that budget, and the shambles of venal 5th raters who are left?
Interesting times.
Very worrying with Biden now after THAT televised 'debate'.
Gavin Newsom is the Democrat president-in-waiting direct from central casting. Can they persuade Sleepy Joe to go?
The consequences are too dreadful to bear.
The world - literally the world - holds its breath.
I know Joe reads this blog and I will say this:
Joe, please do the right thing and step aside. We (the world) need to beat Trump!
Thank you.
