Friday, July 08, 2016

Back home

How fortunate for you that the result of the referendum coincided with our escape to Northumberland. I can't recall another holiday where we have spent so much money on newspapers or spent so much time talking politics (and we talk politics a lot at Hepworth Towers, which is why it's been tricky keeping it out of the blog.) 

These days we usually only buy newspapers on Saturdays, getting our news from the net the rest of the week. But there is no wifi at our favourite cottage so we bought hard copies of news - and boy was it hard. And we varied it - The Guardian, The Times and one copy of the i. Although I don't like the colour of The Times since Murdoch took it over, I did enjoy the clarity of writing, the sound punctuation (me, a geek?), and the variety of news in there that wasn't depressing. The Guardian is nearer to my politics, though it's no longer left enough, but boy does it specialise in depressing news. I can't recall when we stopped getting The Times, but I think it was 2004.  I may be more in tune with what's going wrong in this country and everywhere else since I had a daily diet of Guardian, but it must also correlate with my tendency to be overwhelmed and depressed.

The advantage of buying so many newspapers on holiday is that I had a new sudoku to do everyday and the time to do it, and I am now proficient.  Another vital achievement ticked off.... so important in these dark and troubled times when no-one is in charge of the country. At least it's not Blair. In case you hadn't already guessed - I was one of the million people who marched against the start of the Iraq war in February  2003.  

Here are the last two sentences of The Times editorial from yesterday - "At each end of the period covered by the Chilcot report a British prime minister has faced the consequences of his catastrophic misjudgments - Mr Blair's on Iraq, and David Cameron's on the referendum. Their successors have their work cut out to rebuild the public's trust."

Will it be possible?

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