Lord Gnome meets ‘Doctor Who’

For years I was somehow convinced that if I didn’t keep abreast of news and current affairs then something, I knew not what, would happen and somehow that something would be bad. That in some unspecified way it mattered that I knew that ERM wasn’t a sound, or a poor mans Nirvana. Until it finally dawned on me, that actually no, the sky wouldn’t fall in, and that nobody cared either way.

The news is like a snobbily virtuous ‘Eastenders’, a soap opera with an ever changing cast of characters, some of whom disappear only to return years later with a new face, some who just vanish, some who are just there since forever. All of whom are involved in multiple story lines some all at the same time and some storylines beings both so implausibly absurd and seemingly never ending. Who is or isn’t a hero or a villain, or if a love affair is either torrid or tawdry and if a scheme is delightful or dastardly is all dictated by what news you read chooses to tell you.

It’s complicated but because you’ve put the hours in, it isn’t. There are things you know, that you couldn’t possibly explain how you know them but you just do, and to explain them to anyone else would be both impossible and take too long. And besides, if they weren’t going to stick with it, what would be the point?

I thought about this yesterday, as I was reading ‘Private Eye’ and remembered the old Chinese proverb, the one that has it that if you sit by the river long enough, you’ll see the bodies of your enemies float by. My take on it is that if one has been paying attention to the news for long enough, whilst the faces might change and so might the details, the seemingly endemic human capacity for greed, corruption and duplicitous chicanery remain as ever present as they have ever done. Think of ‘Doctor Who’s’ regenerative ability put in a ‘Groundhog Day’ style ongoing surreality show, where no-one is David Tennant and most people think they’re Boris’s Johnson.

Specifically, while I was reading about Patricia Hannah-Wood and her Remoaner style carryings-on the local elections held on 4th May. Despite only getting 177 votes as compared to her Tory rivals 242 in the ward of Marsden West, the returning officer read out the names in the wrong order, and thus she was elected. Has she acknowledged a mistake was made? No. Have her local Labour Party insisted that she admits an error was made and let democracy win instead? No. Has Labours N.E.C. either charged her with bringing the part into disrepute or expelled her. No, quite the opposite, unsurprisingly. The Labour controlled council have offered her seats on several committees and to oust her, the Tory party faces a legal challenge. For which of course, the taxpayer will have to pay for.

Stop me when this all begins to seem familiar….

And like ‘Eastenders’, it all seemed so much better in the past, when we were young enough and naive enough to imagine that there was only one Dirty Den,

Now, it seems there are Dirty Dens everywhere.