I’ve had niceness foisted upon me…

by Pseud O'Nym

Last night we, as a house, had a communal meal. There’d be nothing noteworthy about that, were it not for the fact that before the house collectively decided up self-isolation amore than two weeks ago now, communal meals were as rare as hens teeth.

Anyway.

Somehow the conversation landed upon Kier Stammer’s election as Labour party leader. This was considered a good thing, not least his decision to almost immediately send a letter to the Board of Jewish Deputies apologising for bullying and anti Semitism in the Labour party. And I thought ‘I must be missing something here, because to me bulling isn’t someone being rude, snide or unpleasant, or making you feel uncomfortable, or ostracising you.?’

To me bullying is about getting the shit kicked out of you on almost a daily basis at school for most of your teenage years. Maybe the definition has changed? Who knows? But one thing I do know is that I’d quite happily have swapped some days where having shit kicked out of me got so unbearable that I wanted to kill myself for feeling a bit ‘oh diddums.’

Of course I’m not Jewish and, as is the modern way, if someone feels something, then it’s true for them and no-one can deny their feelings. I mean they can, but then the wrath of social opprobrium would crush them. Just because my idea of what constitutes bullying isn’t theirs doesn’t make either of us wrong. I just disagree.

Anyway. Kier Stammer. What did I think? That it would be interesting to see the way the press treated him compared to Jeremy Corbinned, I replied. No, they pressed, what did I think of him. Well, I did once think him to be a good egg and everything, what with him providing pro bono legal advice for the McLibel Two. You as well? The longest libel trial in British legal history? Really? Google it.

The thing is Kier Stammer reminds me of Tony Blair, and not in a good way, not that there is good way to like Tony Blair. He became Labour leader when Labour had been out of government for nearly ten years and immediately set about ‘modernising’ it, essentially making it Tory light. This got Labour elected in 1997 and we waited. And waited. And then realised there was no socialism in the Labour party anymore, the social change they were effecting wasn’t as harsh as Thatcherism had been but was closely modelled on it. Its impossible to convey the sense of disillusionment I felt when it slowly dawned that Labour only wanted power for powers sake.

Until Jeremy Corbinned was elected leader that is, promising great things, which unfortunately, the British people didn’t want. The fuckers fucked us all.

I could’ve said most of this but instead I settled for ‘Ambivalent’

‘Oh’, remarked someone who’s only known me since my brain injury, ‘That could sum up your entire character’. It could, of course it could, but it doesn’t. There are many words that describe my character before the brain, but none of them apply to the after. I’ve had to subjugate sides of my innate character because I calculated they weren’t especially helpful to me not after a brain injury and not in a shared house. Because of my brain injury, the way I see it, I’ve had niceness foisted upon me.

Anyone who knew me before the accident could attest to my…oh hang on; they can’t, because nearly all of them have fucked off.