Standing back a bit
The last three readings at Tuesday night's writers' group were all a bit political one way or another. It wasn't planned that way - it never is - but some kind of theme often emerges to tie a few pieces together.
A northern English city's demonstration to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall provided the backdrop to a faltering love story and the ego which had to be told it was faltering. The swelling of the crowd around you, the little group you're really "with", the odd people, sounds, smells that pass by on a march, I remember them well. But here we had jokes that the government were starting to become their Spitting Image characters and a long litany of "what Thatcher has done to the country". Rather familiar.
We usually know how one of our longest-standing member's little poems are going to go, but this night something had gone wrong and it was (a bit) serious. He remembered a big bus, and a message, and wondered how to remind certain people of what they had once said.
The arrival of AIDS in the 1980s, when for far too long there was nothing specific that anybody could do about it, is just one episode in the autobiographical jottings of our retired doctor. It's only an editor's contribution to a series of memoir sketches by different people, not the full Henry Marsh, but a quick wander through budgeting, acquisition of new equipment and development of new methods, and the passing fashions of medicine and policy suggest that some things never change.
And then my taxi arrived and I had to make my excuses, but after the usual challenging array of work in progress I suddenly felt emotional. If we heard the same set of readings next week, after the election, might they sound rather different?
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It's Ramadan, which can be inconvenient when you live in an area where many of the evening taxi drivers are Pakistani-Brits and you need a ride home at 21:30. The company had done me proud though, so I loaded walking stick and rucksack in, and we were off. It wasn't one of the chatty drivers, so I had nothing to add to my catalogue of knowledge when I got home. I've had talks on rearing brine shrimps and pruning roses, and discussions of comparative religion, Pakistani social care conventions and how certain families in what's now Bangladesh profited and suffered in the colonial era.
(I've also talked about the possibilities of building a thriller on the goings-on at Stockport council with a local lad, and the dating of Easter with a local Italian.)
And Ramadan sometimes comes up. Last year I had to direct a driver from out of town to the nearest mosque at the end of his shift and a couple of times we've discussed this month of the Islamic calendar, a month of fasting and devotion, of which Daesh seems to think the finest expression is the fervent killing of others. This last horrifies most Muslims, including taxi drivers.
I've worked closely with a few Muslims in my time in the IT industry. The ex-store-manager consultant without whom we'd never have set up those large-scale demonstrations, the football-mad programmer, the visitor from newly free South Africa who I directed to another colleague for prayer arrangements. If your Muslim mate disappears for a few minutes that's no problem - after all, he could be a smoker - but imagine fasting all day.
The Islamic calendar is based on the lunar cycle, as the months of Roman, Christian and modern calendars have been, and as Easter is fixed in part. But it isn't aligned to the solar year, so Ramadan migrates around the now-standard year. When it's in May-June, as this year, the fasting day is pretty long. But five years back it was July-August, and in 2027 it'll be mostly February. The length of the day is more constant, more amenable in the middle east, where three religions of the book originated.
Imagine having to fit a 28-day fasting and prayer regime in with the demands of a Western capitalist society. They seem to manage it, but I can imagine wishing for a sudden semi-tropical sunset. Lots of other people have their own date-related prayer and fasting habits, but they tend to be more or less closed groups. But what about your brilliant programmer who simply won't work Sundays because she's a Free Presbyterian, or the Jewish system designer who's definitely restricted all weekend?
I had to put up with fish on Fridays and giving things up for Lent when I was growing up, but then some people plan their lives round the Manchester United fixture list. A metaphorical plague on all their houses, but respect to every one of them as a person unless they prove themselves unworthy of it..
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My driver on Wednesday morning was a Pakistani-Brit who's never voted before. He was surprised that we don't vote directly for the prime minister, so he found the idea of a tactical vote confusing. He wondered what effect recent atrocities would have on the vote and I had lots of questions for him, but on a £2 ride back from the supermarket there was time only to urge him to go along and cast his vote, then catch up with the results.
There was certainly no time to discuss #MrsME's threat to change (or rip up, as various newspapers put it) human rights laws if she's reinstalled as prime minister. Commentators objected that there's nothing in the Human Rights Act or the European Convention on Human Rights it incorporates into British law which prevents action against terrorists. How fragile is our law if we need a different human rights framework when three attacks have actually happened, as opposed to three months ago, when an attack was "only" highly likely and we're told that eighteen plots have been foiled since 2013.
Review the law, certainly. It's what you do when something goes wrong, but resorting to "More powers! Tougher measures! Longer sentences!" smacks of hasty legislation and leisurely repentance, or even pure electioneering. The Financial Times legal commentator made the general point...
Why Theresa May's assault on human rights law is misguided.— David Allen Green (@davidallengreen) June 7, 2017
By me, at @FT https://t.co/1IkvPVkdxg
(Do share the screengrab below.) pic.twitter.com/L8u4UQyFFt
and told a cautionary tale.
1. Here is the tale of Theresa and Abu.— David Allen Green (@davidallengreen) May 4, 2017
France has derogated temporarily from some parts of the convention, and the UK could do likewise if, after serious consideration, it was considered necessary to declare a state of emergency.
As the day ended we realised again that throughout this "Brexit election" we had learned nothing new from any party about the process of withdrawal. Just confirmation that some people who claim to be ready to govern this country know nothing - they profess themselves ready to settle for "no deal" for example - and that UKIP think unskilled immigration can be halted immediately because "they're already here" according to spokesperson John Bickley.
We had also learned that Theresa May is terrified of the world, or a control freak, or both. We might discover in coming months how much that's natural and how much was dictated by Lynton Crosby, but who can take her seriously when she finally grants an interview to Channel 4 News and won't even allow them to drag out a couple of chairs.
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| Well Prime Minister, just why are you so timid? |
Even many of those who want him to crash and burn in this election admitted that Jeremy Corbyn's campaign has been far more effective than they expected. It's amazing what two years of practice can do, and how you can get your message across rather better when the broadcast media are legally required to give you a fair look in to counteract the rabid right wing press. It makes you wonder what public service the broadcasters think they're delivering at other times.
Saboteurs department
Letter of the year in an angry UK general election campaign.....@FT pic.twitter.com/DE3DbJWgGb— Lionel Barber (@lionelbarber) June 7, 2017
