I’ve never had any desire to have children.

Some people do and that’s laudable. There are countless children put up for adoption every year which means the need is there, so why, one wonders, aren’t more people adopting? But to some, that isn’t the same thing as having a child of one’s own, because at some future date the birth mother might herself known to the child with potentially catastrophic consequences. And more importantly, the adoptive parents will know the child isn’t theirs and no matter how much they convince themselves it is theirs, will know deep down it isn’t.

But thankfully, we now live in a world in which nature can increasingly be circumvented. I myself am living proof of this. By rights I should’ve died years ago after my accident had I not been put into a medically induced coma for a month. But that was a medical emergency whereas this post is about elective procedures – one’s that the patient chooses to have – and more specifically, one reported in The Guardian on Wednesday which I think is both indicative of the times we live in and a warning of the danger of unforeseen consequences.

“Woman ‘over the moon’ after sister donates womb in UK first” ran the headline about a woman with an ‘undeveloped womb’ who had her sisters womb donated to her. Everyone concerned was absolutely thrilled with how it all went and presumably this news was only revealed after a suitable interval and exhaustive tests had confirmed all was well. There have been ninety of these transplants around the world, leading to fifty births and it is hoped that this ‘pioneering operation could allow dozens of infertile women a year to have babies.’ The co-lead surgeon, Isabel Quigora claims that women have already been in touch with the charity that helped fund this to offer donate their wombs.

Therein lies one of the problems I have with this. Yes, if they’ve already have had their children or know that they never will have them in the first place, then offering to donate their womb is their choice. But is it a choice they should even be allowed to make? Did I miss something, possibly when I was in the coma? When was the public ever consulted about this? Maybe there was and ‘Google’ can’t find them. Apparently, ‘they were also assessed by a Human Tissue Authority (HTA) independent assessor to ensure they were aware of the risks and to confirm they were entering into the surgery of their own free will. The case was reviewed by an HTA panel before permission was granted to proceed.’ Exactly how reassuring is that? How many times has a HTA panel said no? And who is on that panel anyway?

According to their own website, the board of the HTA from which the panel comprises is made up of exactly the sort of people one would expect to find on it. Anyone who is chosen to sit on a board like this will have been exhaustively vetted to make sure they’re the ‘right’ sort of person. ‘Right’ meaning someone equipped with the ability to understand all the issues involved, and by dint of that, reliable enough not to rock the boat too much.

But whoever they get approval from, whatever hoops they have to jump through or what self-serving criteria has to be met, giving infertile women the chance to have a baby has got to be a good thing, doesn’t it? Or is it? Where is it written that whatever you wish for you shall have? If nature has decided motherhood is not for you, then nature can increasingly be ignored, reduced to another obstacle to be overcome.

Science is advancing all the time, so what is impossible today, may not always be so tomorrow. . And it isn’t so much that science is advancing all the time and more that science doesn’t actually exist. Well not in the way that a tree does or in the way that most people understand something to exist. It isn’t one thing. It’s an umbrella term used as a shorthand for a complicated series of nebulous theories, hypothesises and postulations are constantly being challenged and refined. The people that do this, scientists, are not neutral observers in all of this.

Scientists have an agenda and that is to advance their own careers within the particular field of science they are engaged in. It’s human nature. No footballer wants to be playing non league football, he wants to be playing for Real Madrid, for example. But science is increasingly obviating nature and what it means to be human, and because scientists live in the same society we do are subject to the same, if not more pressure to adhere to the prevailing orthodoxy. So whilst transplanting a womb may seem like a good thing, it ultimately devalues what it it is to be a woman. Because we have no idea where this will lead, so whilst they might be able to transplant a womb today, scientists have already successfully grown a mouse embryo in an artificial womb, uterus transplants are now a thing, meaning it is now theoretically possible for transgender woman to give birth, which will lead to what?

Exactly, no-one knows.

And just to be clear, a woman is a biological female.

I’ve not posted in a while and this is due to John Lennon. Not that he was responsible in any way for this, this, but more that his quip “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” rather neatly sums up the last few weeks for me.

One of the things that has vexed me over the last few days has been the perplexing outrage surrounding Bradley Cooper and his decision to wear a prosthetic nose when playing Leonard Bernstein in a film about the composer. I’m perplexed because the outrage didn’t come from his family, because they issued a statement to the effect they were fine with it. I’m also perplexed because if he hadn’t worn a prosthetic nose to play Bernstein, the professionally outraged would’ve been outraged by that. But mostly I’m perplexed by the idea which permeates modern culture that has it that is more important that you share either ethic or cultural similarities with the character you are playing, than any other factor. That it is the actors perceived appropriateness for the role, as determined by an ever changing cadre voices seemingly beholden to an equally ever changing criteria, rather than talent which is all important.

But of course, this being the modern world in which we live, exceptions and contradictions apply. The entire MCU for example. That gets a free pass. So to do the ‘Batman’ films and the ‘Harry Potter’ films. Anything with either ghosts, vampires, zombies or aliens as well. Why aren’t those subjected to a similar level of opprobrium? Because we know that Iron Man and Batman aren’t real, that wizards don’t exists, and that the only zombies you’ll ever see will be if you happen to near a club at 5am on a Saturday morning.

No-one picks up the cultural cudgels to beat an actor with when they play a serial killer. No-one is suggesting only serial killers can play serial killers. But why aren’t they? Why can’t Lucy Letby be allowed on day release so she can have another career? When exactly does a demand for appropriateness become inappropriate?

What some people conveniently overlook when it suits them to do so is the fact that actors act. They have a job, which is to utter words others have written, to utter those words as directed by someone else. Their purpose is to entertain.

And how entertaining or not Cooper is as Bernstein, nobody knows. The film premieres in Venice next month. The professionally outraged are outraged by a trailer of a film that they haven’t seen. It seems that the willing suspension of disbelief, which an audience needs to make most creative endeavours succeed, has been suspended all too willing by them.

Equally perplexing and equally unfunny, the 10 best one liners at the Edinburgh Fringe were announced today. Here they are

1. I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah – Lorna Rose Treen 
2. The most British thing I’ve ever heard? A lady who said ‘Well I’m sorry, but I don’t apologise.’ – Liz Guterbock 
3. Last year I had a great joke about inflation. But it’s hardly worth it now – Amos Gill 
4. When women gossip we get called bitchy; but when men do it’s called a podcast – Sikisa 
5. I thought I’d start off with a joke about The Titanic – just to break the ice – Masai Graham
6. How do coeliac Germans greet each other? Gluten tag – Frank Lavender
7. My friend got locked in a coffee place overnight. Now he only ever goes into Starbucks, not the rivals. He’s Costa-phobic – Roger Swift
8. I entered the ‘How not to surrender’ competition and I won hands down – Bennett Arron
9. Nationwide must have looked pretty silly when they opened their first branch – William Stone 
10. My grandma describes herself as being in her “twilight years” which I love because they’re great films – Daniel Foxx 

To me, a one liner should be wholly separate from the rest of the comics set, be a self-contained burst of hilarity. You wouldn’t even get these in a Christmas cracker. They’re about as funny as a kick in the bollocks

Did you see it? I did and it wasn’t a surprise, more of of a predictable piece of nonsense that once again held Brexit up as the main causative factor behind whatever perceived ‘problem’ upsets the denizens of Kings Place. Today, ‘The Guardian’ was crying into its organic ridiculousness about:

Post-Brexit fall in English ownership of European second homes, figures show, screamed a prominent headline and when one clicked on it came the chilling news that a Government survey finds that less than 30% of holiday homes are on continent – compared with 40% a decade ago

The article went on to quote a couple of people who didn’t in any way whatsoever have a vested interest in blaming all their woes upon Brexit.

Annette de Vries, an estate agent in Monpazier, in the Dordogne, said that the additional bureaucracy of Brexit had deterred many people from buying in France.

“Less British people are looking for houses than before,” she said. “The main reason is Brexit. It’s so much more difficult for British people to buy something here. They need health insurance and that’s very difficult for them.”

Sylvie Mayer, an estate agent in Huelgoat, Brittany, said: “Many Britons have left the area. Since last summer, a lot of them have sold their second homes because the paperwork got too complicated for them to spend time here.”

All very Guardian were it not for the somewhat inconvenient truth that hot on the heels of Brexit came Covid and the one saving grace – for me anyway – was that not only did we have a glorious summer that year, but I also had a large garden to make the most of this unexpected good fortune. With the gradual easing of lockdown restrictions, came foreign holiday restrictions leading to the increase of holidays in the UK. Might that, a rational fear of another pandemic and lockdown, curbs on foreign travel make people think twice before buying a second home abroad? After all, what use is a second home if you can’t use it.

More importantly, someone who can afford a second home isn’t really someone I’m going to shed any tears for. If you can afford a second home, the chances are you didn’t vote for Brexit because you did enjoy some of the benefits that EU membership conferred. That possibly ‘health insurance’ and supposedly complicated ‘paperwork’ is the very definition of what a service industry is there to sort out?

Also, isn’t cutting back on air travel a good thing? Exactly a state of affairs that one would expect “The Guardian’ to be pleased about. Oh no, silly me, I was forgetting that ‘The Guardian’ serves a panderocracy, which they call readers but which are really their paymasters/shot-callers/proprietors/ and their self-serving double standards.

Must keep the flow of money flowing so even if is a story that has nothing to do with Brexit, well it happened after June 2016, so Brexit must have something to do with it.

I voted to Remain, by the way.

Maybe it’s me, possibly because I’m brain damaged, possibly because I’m not in the least bit affected either way, or possibly I don’t venerate children in the same way that our society seems to. More likely it’s a combination of all three.

Whatever it is, I can’t work out why Not Hardies statement to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg last Sunday that Labour if won the next election he would keep the controversial two child benefit rule was so deserving on the criticism it received. I mean obviously I can, just as much as I can see why some called it controversial but to me, these people are living in a different world, imagining we still live in a world of plenty and not of food banks.

Quick recap time. According to ‘The Guardian’, the rule prevents parents from claiming child tax credit or universal credit for any third or subsequent child born after April 2017. It was introduced by the former chancellor George Osborne in his austerity drive with the aim of encouraging parents of larger families to find a job or work more hours.

Am I missing something here? If you were on universal credit (UC) or claiming child tax credit (CTC) for two children and had just conceived a third after July 2016 but before April 2017, then yes, I can see why you’d be angry. You’d only have yourselves to blame, but you’d be right to be angry at yourself, given as how the change was announced in the Budget of 2015, indicating how it was to implemented in April 2017.

Unless I’m very much mistaken, what this means is that anyone already claiming UC or CTC for two or more children, then deciding to have yet more children after the announcement was made and the implications made clear have only themselves to blame. The government made their position clear, gave well enough warning and if people are so bereft of common sense as to not practice proper birth control or else to access effective preventative measures to terminate the foetus, well the government can hardly be held responsible for that. Condoms, the contraceptive pill, the morning after pill and abortions are available. We’re not America.

According to ‘The Guardian’, ‘ Abolishing the cap would cost £1.3bn a year but would lift 250,000 children out of poverty, and a further 850,000 would be in less deep poverty, according to campaigners. The End Child Poverty coalition says removing the cap would be the most cost-effective way of reducing the number of children living in poverty.’ What about the cost to the planet in all of this?. The weather is getting warmer, our energy needs are increasing and we can barely meet demand as it is. In winter the weather is getting colder, which again increase our energy needs, which we’ll be even less likely to meet demand if poverty campaigners, no matter how well intentioned, advocate measures that will only plunge more people – not just children – into poverty.

Net Zero by 2050? What could possibly go wrong, aside from increasing unpredictable energy supplies occasioning not only travel instability but also decreased agricultural output and higher food prices? I know the ‘The Guardian’ needs to perpetuate the myth to its readers that having children is somehow equitable with lowering energy demands, limiting consumption and polluting less to ensure that its readers continue proving financial support to fund their delusions, but when are they going to stop and simply point out some harsh truths to them. All concerned might find it liberating.

Has the cost of living crisis been sorted and I wasn’t paying attention? Thought not.

One of the main drivers of the cost of living crisis, is that there are too many people living both nationally and globally to be in any way sustainable. Just because some might find this sentiment unpalatable doesn’t make it any the less true. People are living longer which puts ever increasing pressure on the NHS, public services and infrastructure, and the dwindling proportion of taxpayers relative to the amount of people claiming benefits. So any extension on the limit of this particular benefit to feckless spongers should be celebrated.

Or is ir just me?

There are two types of film genre I can’t be doing with, sci-fi and horror.

In my view, one goes to the cinema to be entertained, although seeing as how ‘No Time To Die’ was the last film I saw in a cinema was and that was as entertaining as a public hanging. Given as how they killed James Bond and all, possibly that film is the exception that proves the rule.

The problem I have with most sci-fi films, is that they make up their own rules, which I call my ‘magic button’ theory. Invariably, at some point of a sci-fi film, something will happen, maybe a seemingly inescapable situation is suddenly escaped from at the last second, or possibly the heroes will thwart the villains plans for this or that by miraculously – and also at the last second- exploiting a hitherto unremarked upon flaw in their plans.

Admittedly, a few do not. The excellent ‘Moon’ being a case in point. Logically consistent and being set on just the right side of a future that was already being seriously speculated on – extracting precious minerals from asteroids, remember when that was a thing – and well that’s it. There are bound to be more, there must be, but off the top of my head I can’t recall them. Perhaps as I’m writing this post, some ‘non magic button’ ones will occur to me. Thinking of ‘magic buttons, I think of ‘Doctor Who’, which gets a free pass because it not only has so many magic buttons to be almost a parody of itself, but I’m English and well, duh!

Horror films are kind of the same, but with added wankiness. The genre has so many tropes, visual cliches and other bollocks, that directors are lauded by critics for making a film that subverts the genre. It’s not three scantily clad young women who investigate creepy noises outside their remote woodside cabin late at night, no its three older women, or maybe its early evening. Soon, directors will be subverting the subversion by returning to the old tropes, but insisting they’re paying homage to the genres traditions. Or pastiche, if its a ’15’ rating their after.

I was thinking about this after watching ‘Nope’, the latest attempt in Jordan Peele’s quest to become like M.Night Shyamalan, another emperor who wears no clothes. Although at least he was upfront with it what with the title of the film being a clue right off the bat.

Was I going to enjoy this? ‘Nope’. Was it going to make any sense? ‘Nope’. Were any of the characters going to fully fleshed out, have a compelling back story or something that’d make me want to root for them? ‘Nope’. Was it going to make me glad my house-mate had made me buy it on Prime, or that my investment in time was rewarded? ‘Nope’

But according to Wikipedia, “Nope is a 2022 American neo-Western, science fiction horror film”, it has an 83% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a lot of people who are paid to tell others what to think were so convinced that the film the film touched upon a lot of important themes that I thought they’d watched another film.

This is why I thought of ‘2001’, a film that is as bewildering as it is overrated and in that it shares similarities with ‘Monty Python’. Like ‘2001’ most people only liked ‘Monty Python’ because they didn’t want to embarrass themselves, to admit to not understanding something everyone else agreed was both terribly clever and unlike anything else that had gone before it. They both became something that others explained to others why they should enjoy it, without actually enjoying it themselves.

Mind you, given that ‘Nope’ had world-wide box office of $172 million, against a budget of $68 million. when I think of the attendant marketing, publicity and distribution costs that a film is saddled with nowadays, I joyously admit that the truly horrific thing about ‘Nope’ was its awful box office.

Where to start?

Well I should be writing a post which extols the sheer ease with which the city planners have made cycling in Amsterdam such a joy. But that post is for another day.

This post is going to be about the hypocrisy of ‘The Sun’, which broke the ‘story’ about the BBC presenter who is alleged to have paid a younger woman for sexually explicit ‘photos of her. My problem with all this manufactured pandering to the mob – well one of them anyway – is that there isn’t a story here at all.

If the young woman had been a very young woman when he’d first suggested paying for sexually explicit ‘phot’s that would be another matter, but she wasn’t, but was over the age of consent, meaning that however distasteful one might find it, no actual crime was commited. Nor is there one in her using the money he is alleged to have paid her to fund a drug habit which sadly has ended up with her being a crack addict. Maybe if he have said, when she gave him the ‘photo’s ‘Here’s some money but you can only spend it on drugs, and here’s the number of my drug dealer. She can sort you right out.”

But he didn’t, just as much as she didn’t use the money for something else. A deposit on a flat. Doing a degree at Birkbeck. A holiday. That was her choice. If somehow he becomes culpable for how she spent the money, then Camelot should be by rights shitting themselves.

As ironic good luck would have it, the first hit you get when you type ‘ National Lottery winners drugs’ into Google is this story in ‘The Sun’ detailing how someone who won £13M, spent it all on drugs.

The other thing that annoys me is that ‘The Sun’ is somehow portraying itself as some kind of moral arbiter. It’d be laughable if it weren’t so offensive. This, lest we forget, is the paper that every day for 44 years published topless ‘photos of women, well I write women but the most famous of them, Samantha Fox, was 16 when she started.

They only stopped in 2015.

I know that the two are nowhere near the same, mainly that for 20p one could perv along with countless others, whereas he was paying for exclusivity, but they are on the same spectrum.

According to wikipedia “In British media, a reverse ferret is a sudden reversal in an organisation’s editorial or political line on a certain issue. Generally, this will involve no acknowledgement of the previous position.”

I am presently in Amsterdam, but the computer on which I write these posts is in London, but thanks to WordPress having a facility whereby one can write a post and schedule it to be published at a later date, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Or did, on June 20th, so therefore what follows may well be an accurate narrative of what is going on, but equally, it may not be.

Anyway, I’m here in Amsterdam with Marge, my former house-mate, cycling around Amsterdam and its surrounding area on an electric version of the adult tricycle I used to own. Electric it may be, but it still has the same fundamental problem that my one had. That of having three wheels, two control freaks but only one set of controls. It’s not so much that I need to be in control, but more that I’m so much better at it it than anyone else. The problem is that she almost certainly thinks the same way too. She used to joke that the only reason she hadn’t killed me yet was because if she did, she’d have nothing left to look forward to. This holiday may prove otherwise.

So, the train journey on Eurostar was either ease from start to finish, with everyone being as helpful as possible or a complete nightmare, where everything that could go wrong, did. Equally, the accommodation she, she, booked on airbnb is is both handily located for our needs and utterly delightful in every way, or it may be in Amsterdam the way London Stanstead airport is in London and makes one think of the shithole Withail lived in. Navigating our way to the bike hire shop from where we are may be simplicity itself, with helpful and plentiful signs, understanding locals and patient car drivers or it may be a tabloid headline in the making, warning those Dammed Amsters of the foolishness of tourists.

That’s before we get to the cycling component of the holiday.

Whilst there have been numerous warnings about unusually hot weather in Amsterdam we may well have heeded such and brought sensible clothes – hats, linen shirts, shorts etc – sun cream and water bottles or we may have thought it all was a lot of fuss over nothing and brought totally unsuitable clothes. We may have learnt from our previous jaunts, and chosen to bring on our bike rides only what can be safely stored about our person, possibly utilising a backpack to make things easier, or else we will be like a modern day Hansel and Gretel, leaving a trail of odds and ends that have fallen out of our pockets littering Amsterdams countryside. The cycle routes themselves will wend and weave us through some breathtaking scenery, on cycle-lanes that are as easy to navigate as they are well maintained, or we’ll be beset by routes that take us through deserted industrial parks, and in one one of which, late at night and at the furthest possible point from our accommodation, we’ll get a puncture.

The travel insurance I bought may have been in hindsight totally superfluous, or a prudent move, especially when she reads this post and with some force, repeatedly introduces her feet and fists to my man bits, deciding that its high time that that she put me out of her misery. It might happen.

Finally!

I knew it was only a matter of time, of ‘when’ and not ‘if’, until the fanciful imaginings of my youth – and also of countless of others – became tantalisingly close to becoming a reality.

An Olympic-styled competition for drug-taking athletes is being launched by an Australian entrepreneur.

Melbourne-born, London-based businessman, Aron D’Souza is the president of Enhanced Games, a coalition of athletes, doctors and scientists. He plans to stage the inaugural games of no drug testing in December next year.

Who in the world, after being off their trolley on drugs and finding themselves to unable to complete even the most simple of tasks without it taking ages, hasn’t thought ‘If it takes me this long to make a cup of tea, imagine how much better the Olympics would be if everyone was on drugs?’?

Just imagine the fun watching it would be!

It’d be like ‘It’s a Knockout’, with lycra instead of enormous padded costumes. The chaos of the 5000m, the danger of the javelin, the utter slapstick of any cycle race, the folly of even attempting a marathon. It’d be TV gold, and don’t tell me you wouldn’t watch it because I know would. You could even ‘take part’ – which programmes continually exhort us to do nowadays – and take the drugs the athletes were taking as you sat safely on the sofa and placed bets on how long the 4x400m relay would take.

The Winter Olympics would be even better. The sheer lunacy of the downhill slalom! The absolute insanity of anyone even attempting the ski jump! Curling is already bonkers enough as it is, so imagine if they were all on acid? I

tI’d all be like the best bit bit in ‘For Your Eyes Only’ where Bond has to ski down a bobsleigh run, as gunmen on motorcycles chase him. Only much better.

I know its only days, but the seed has been planted, and much like anyone who’s ever tried to grow their own pot plants, we just have to wait and see if anything happens.

Just looked at ‘The Guardian’. They have a review of her performance at Glastonbury. I mis-read it initially.

Blondie at Glastonbury review – Debbie Harry is an atomic charisma bomb

I saw the word ‘bomb’ and assumed she’d done a Keanu Reeves who with his band ‘Dogstar’ played what is considered to be one of the worst sets ever played there.

But no, 4 stars.

Anyway, I just wanted to finish the story about her that I started the other day. One of the years of the mud. Finding a tent that sold tea and had seating. Sitting down on something dry at last. A shaven headed extra from ‘The Matrix’ coming in and saying that Debbie was outside, wanted to come in and would anyone give up their seats.

The answer was, of course, no. Didn’t stop him asking everyone In the tent though. Same answer.

Back when I was sharing a house with Marge, Joe, and the glorious force of nature that was their daughter, Little Miss Sunshine (LMS), LMS thought that my idea of a good time was to watch “Peppa Pig’ on the computer with her. It wasn’t, and I told her this, but as it suited her needs to do so, she ignored me. I watched so much of it that I ended up venting my frustration in a post entitled ‘Is Peppa Pig mind control’

She was only about 4 and I resigned that it couldn’t get worse. How wrong I was. She then went through her ‘Holly and Ben’ phase, made using a style of animation that might charitably be called ‘naive playfulness’ but to my eyes, made ‘Scooby-Do’ look like the work of a creative visionary. Telling the ‘stories’ of the ‘adventures of ‘Holly’ – a fairy princess – and ‘Ben’- an elf – it was worse than it sounds. But she’d watch, equally enthralled and with an endless appetite for more of them. By now she was about 6, and I owed her.

Because no matter how many different anti-depressants I was prescribed after my brain injury, nothing was as effective as an insistent 2 year old banging on my bedroom door, telling me to get up because she wanted to play. So it was the least I could do, but too late I realised that by enduring both ‘Peppa Pig’ and ‘Holly and Ben’, I’d made a rod for my own back and that rod had a name.

“Frozen’

If you know why this cultural abomination is so reviled by anyone over 10 who has had the misfortune to see it, then you have my sympathy. If you haven’t seen it, don’t. It makes ‘The Greatest Showman’ – which I’ve also watched more times than a grown man should – seem like a towering cinematic achievement in comparison. It’s that bad. But she loved it – I mean she really loved it – to such a point where she could sing all of the aural detritus -‘songs’ – far more enjoyably to my ear than the film versions. ‘Let It Go’ was a particular favourite of hers and she would sing as if she were channelling the spirit of Ethel Merman. That’s high praise, by the way, just in case you think otherwise.

Anyway, I was thinking of ‘Let It Go’ when I saw yet another poll in ‘The Guardian’ seeking to bolster their position that Brexit was a con, that people who voted for it were conned and that anyone who campaigned for ‘No’ was unspeakably guilty of enabling something that they didn’t like. They way they carry-on one might imagine them patiently admonishing a truculent child,

‘Now it would be in everyone’s best interests if we just put the whole thing behind us and pretended like it never happened. We know you had a temper tantrum and we hope you feel better for it now, now you’ve got it out of your system. But that’s all it was, a temper tantrum, and as the adults here it would be remiss of us not just to point out that you were wrong to act in that way to begin with, not just to point out that what you thought would make things better, hasn’t. But more importantly, to make sure you never get such wrong-headed idea’s ever again. Because that would upset us, and we don’t like being upset.’

Thus we had on this bit of democracy bashing on Thursday,

Only 18% of leave voters think Brexit has been a success, poll finds

Mmm. But if 18% think that, doesn’t that mean 82% think something else? What might that something else be, I wonder. Oh hang, a detail that wasn’t worthy of an eyeball grabbing top story clickbait was to be found in the text, once you had clicked on the story and bothered to read a bit that is, that 30% said it had gone neither well nor badly, and 26% said it was still too soon to say.

That means then that if 18% of people polled think one thing but 56% think a combination of other things, that’s, er a total of 74%. That can’t be right, can it, that 26% of people polled just vanish? But it seems that they can and did, because there’s no mention of them anywhere else, but the story just throws up other percentages that prove this and damn that.

It does helpfully note however that the pollsters Public First asked more than 4,000 leavers how they felt now about Brexit. Not helpful enough to tell us how much more than 4,000 leavers were polled – was 1 or 207 – or how the pollsters were able to accurately identify leave voters, but hey, what’s the use a running a story about a poll if you can’t cherry pick the results?

Hilarious, as it turned out. It provided proof that the Law of Unintended Consequence’s can cause embarrassment to be dressed up giving space to an alternative view. Because the next day ‘The Guardian’ ran – or more likely was forced to run after complaints from the pollsters Public First – an opinion piece by Anand Menon, the director of The UK in a Changing Europe, who commissioned the survey and Sophie Stowers, a researcher there. Ostensibly to reinforce the sentiments expressed by the audience in the previous nights BBC1’s ‘Brexit Question Time’, with findings from their survey, they wrote,

One of the most interesting comments last night came from an audience member who was sick of being told she had been lied to. A majority of leavers feel they had all the information they needed to make a decision in 2016. And a plurality think that they had sufficient information from both sides of the referendum campaign to make an informed decision. What they resent is the fact that political leaders have not capitalised on the sovereignty for which they voted; 39% of them think politicians have not even tried to make Brexit work.

Hang on, that’s not quite the narrative that ‘The Guardian’ endlessly perpetuates, that of leave voters being hoodwinked, lied to or subjected to Russian something or other. Nay, nay, and thrice nay! But they weren’t done yet, endowing those who voted to leave with rational thinking, which must’ve been something of a shock to a ‘Guardian reader/organ grinder/sponsor who imagined them all to be pitch-fork wielding illiterates.

Yet while they are frustrated, leavers did not expect instant results. A quarter of them think not enough time has passed to judge whether Brexit has gone well or badly; 61% think Brexit will turn out well or very well in the future. There was a sense among those in the audience last night that they did not expect to wake up on 24 June 2016 in a whole different Britain. Rather, Brexit is an ongoing process that, while politicians have messed it up to date, still holds the promise of greater successes to come.

Steady on! Next you’ll saying that leavers don’t experience any doubt as to the certainty of how they voted, oh, that is what they say

So, it should come as no surprise that many – including most of those in Clacton last night – still back the decision they made in 2016. In our survey, 72% of 2016 leave voters, knowing what they do now, would still vote as they did. There was much groaning and eye-rolling at (Alastair) Campbell’s support to rejoin the EU. For most leavers, even those who are “Bregretful”, another referendum is not the answer.

The Guardian’ is treating its disciples in much the same way that ‘Peppa Pig’, then ‘Holly and ‘Ben’ and finally ‘Frozen’ treated LMS It gives them what they want, a simple and graspable narrative, that they know will get them and more importantly, keep them hooked. The one difference being that LMS was a child and was treated as a child, with no discernible ill effects. ‘The Guardian’, by contrast, treats adults as children, with a poll seemingly every other week, always finding something that’ll reinforce their increasingly contemptuous attitude to democracy. That democracy only works when it works for us, and if it doesn’t, well we’ll just have moan and complain until it does.

I just want to point out, in case you’ve forgotten, that I voted to Remain. I didn’t however, vote to remain perpetually petulant about the result though.

And if I did, then I’d blame 27.2% of voters who could have voted and changed things, but couldn’t be bothered. That’s who the real villains are, the one’s that exercised their democratic right not to vote, that’s who “The Guardian’ should demonise instead, but doesn’t because it doesn’t suit their simplistic narrative.