People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day. Today, so far, has been a great day: I woke up in the morning, got out of bed, and went to the bathroom, in that order!
While cooking my porridge, I listened to the news: more demonstrations on Sydney Harbour Bridge about a country the demonstrators couldn't even point to on a map; more floods in the upper Hunter and more snow in the Snowy Mountains; and Trump is postponing the invasion of Greenland by his usual two weeks because he's busy playing golf, but he's agreed that, if we take his beef, he'll take our Beef Wellington.
There is so much else to demonstrate about (or against): communism, socialism, capitalism, Nazism, Fascism. Why, I'd even join them if they were demonstrating against rheumatism. We've tried democracy and clearly it hasn't worked. So let's give dictatorship a go. After all, Mussolini made those Italian trains run on time, Stalin really put Siberia on the map and Hitler did wonders for the documentary film channel.
Elections have become a joke as we can vote for either Dominic Tweedledee or Chris Tweedledum. Listening to their campaign speeches, I've concluded that LOL stands for 'Lots of lies'. It is claimed that a country gets the politicians it deserves. I'm struggling to identify just what it is we have done to be so undeserving. I usually do my voting by mail because what I think of the bastards could not be said in public.
(Of course, you have to be eighteen years old to be allowed to vote which is surprising since even a four-year-old can now already decide in kindergarten what sex he or she (or it) wants to be. Now that all of them have achieved marriage rights, they face the same moral quandary we did: should they have sex before marriage?)
Even Oxfam no longer just wants to save children; they now want to save our language as well by putting out a 92-page bizarre 'inclusive' language guide to their staff which warns against 'colonial' phrases such as 'headquarters', suggests 'local' may be offensive and says 'people' could be patriarchal. All the familiar rubbish is trotted out: 'parent' is preferable to 'mother' or 'father', and 'people who become pregnant' should be used instead of 'expectant mothers'. The introduction apologises for being written in and about the English language, saying: 'We recognise that this guide has its origin in English, the language of a colonising nation. We acknowledge the Anglo-supremacy of the sector as part of its coloniality.' [Sadly ‘coloniality’ is a real word — it's in the Oxford, recorded from 1862.] This absurd introduction goes on: 'This guide aims to support people who have to work and communicate in the English language as part of this colonial legacy. However, we recognise that the dominance of English is one of the key issues that must be addressed in order to decolonise our ways of working and shift power.' What will they do? Use sign language? I have just the sign for them!
(And now that 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' has been replaced with 'Baa Baa Little Sheep', I presume I have become the little sheep of the family. Still, it is refreshing to note that in the politically correct society we have created, we can still refer to a black hole in a financial context although I'd be happy to call it anything as long as I get out of it. As for changing the name of little Titty in Arthur Ransome's "Swallows and Amazons" to a more politically correct Tatty, may I suggest that at a time when nouns and verbs are so often muddled together, it's become quite urgent to also give Roger the ship's boy a change of name.)
It's still early morning at "Riverbend". Padma has gone into the Bay to help a friend run a charity stall in the shopping centre, and I can look forward to a peaceful day. May there be many more days like this!
