EU Referendum

The Wake

/ aspinalllucy / 1 Comment

Maybe if you know Jeremy Corbyn personally you don’t think he is ‘dismal, lifeless and spineless’ but his campaign to get Labour voters to vote remain certainly was.

Dear reader, I will come back to that so you have been warned.

In our village there was a very tactful lack of campaign posters on either side and a general tacit agreement in the pub – at least amongst the people we drink with – not to talk about it.

Maybe on Friday there were some hoop-doopey-do celebratory parties going on across our part of Deepest Sussex – but in our house there was a wake.

A very nice wake with good friends, and who better to have at a wake with, but there was a real sense of loss not just for us but for the next generation.

What right do we have to retreat into the post war view of Great Britain (with lots of capital letters) and leave the next generation out of the Europe they have grown up with and want to live in.

It makes me angry – but I do not think that everyone who voted to leave is a racist bigot.

I do think if I had voted to leave on the basis that there was £350m available now to put into the NHS and that immigration would be cut to ‘the tens of thousands’ I would be mightily fed up to find Farage finally admitting that the £350m was a lie, and that the Brexit lot are saying that controlling immigration does not mean cutting the numbers.

And many people did vote based on those promises.

Boris, the man campaigning ‘against the elite’ spent yesterday playing cricket as a guest of Viscount Althorp.

If this is the man to be our new leader and unite us, then ‘god’ help us.

Mind you, I have to say – and so back my beginning – some MPs in the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn should be ashamed of themselves.

Lots of this campaign – of course not here in Deepest Sussex but in places where life is just a teensy bit tougher – was about being mightily fed up with the political class, with obsessive media coverage of the machinations of Westminster, with being seriously out of touch and definitely not using the old maxim of ‘you have two ears and one mouth, use them wisely.’

I cannot claim to be in the least bit bothered that the Tory Party is tearing chunks out of itself and each other but someone/some party should be studying up for fairness.

David Cameron said we were all in this together but we weren’t. We aren’t. And the people who have felt this most keenly have told them all to bugger off.

I think it was the wrong way to say it. Leaving the EU does not make for a change in the political class in Britain and if you think Boris is going to make a significant difference to NHS waiting times in Sheffield or Scunthorpe or Southsea you may find out that he doesn’t. No way.

But we need a Labour Party leader who does care about fairness and surely Jo Cox wasn’t the only Labour MP to be such a great person who worked for real values, who fought and laughed and could talk to people and who believed in the same things that lots of us – in or out – believe in. Someone out there in the Labour Party must be able to do that – and be a leader.

Jeremy Corbyn may well be a man of principle but his ideas are 30 years out of date ( at least, and I should know because they were out of date when I was a political lass.) One of his supporters said he had a ‘nuanced’ message.

But a referendum is binary, back and white, in or out – not bloody nuanced.

And yes, he campaigned around the country but to meetings called by his supporters. That is just not good enough. Not by a country mile as we might say round here. He has to go.

However, and deep breath at the end of that rant, there were few things which made me laugh in the last few days but here are two of them:

A great Facebook posting which said,

Cornwall has voted to leave!! Cornwall received almost £800m of EU Objective One funding between 2000-2013. Didn’t you like your new university? Massive new tourism infrastructure (Eden Project)? or super-fast broadband provision?

That’s a lot of money to replace by selling Poldark tea towels…

And then there was the news that the person who set up the petition which at time of writing has more than 3m people demanding a new referendum ( which we won’t get, or maybe even could cope with, but it sends a message) was actually an ‘outer’ who though they would lose.

Back to the wake. We had nice food, we had music, we had a laugh and almost a cry, we had thoughts about what we could do and should do to, realised that this went across party boundaries – whether you were in or out – and what a big day it was to be together.

I am planning a series of future wakes.

When Boris becomes Tory leader. When Boris gets elected. When the Labour Party again fails to get its act together, when Trump gets elected…… so much wake planning to do.

Drought and Uncertainty

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Usually I am complaining in a rather martyred way about the amount of books I am clearing every shift at Oxfam, making it quite clear that there is a never ending flood of books that only I am holding back from swamping the shop.

Well, dear reader, it is course not just me by a long chalk – and what is more, at this moment, the flood has turned into a drought.

So, out the back of the shop where we pile the sacks for recycling it is usually just this side of chaos – this week was clear, blank, empty – even, hoovered!

I am not sure what to do with myself if truth be told. Usually whilst sorting books I am complaining ( in a rather martyred way) that I could get on with all sorts of other things to make our shop even more successful if only I didn’t have to empty another ten boxes of books.

But, I have sold the latest collection of erotica to the second-hand bookshop – Oxfam frowns on the idea of selling sex in the shops.

I have put the hobbies and crafts into order – now embroidery books are next to knitting, well away from DIY in a retro/pre-feminist move – and all the books you would ever, ever need to learn how to paint or draw are sitting with each other.

Religion has been sorted into world religions ( in groups, starting with Buddhism and moving alphabetically onwards) with all and sundry other stuff about crystals and angels and spaceship visitations attached on the end of the shelf.

(One day someone is going to buy the massive tome on Dreams and Their Interpretations. I think it may have been around in the shop, one way or another, longer than I have.

Occasionally, I find someone has moved it to the Academic section and, although it protests, I insist on moving it back to Esoteric.)

I have re-ordered the Old & Interesting into blocks of colour – all the blue books, the green books etc etc.

And every time you change the shelves – update, juggle, fiddle, change the front-facing books, you always get more interest in them.

There were two books – dating from the 1960s – about hunting in junk shops.

They have been out on the shelves for months and I was just about the cull them – short as we are of books, standards need to be maintained, or at least upheld more or less  and anyway, they didn’t find my colour-coding plan – when a customer fell upon them with delight. At £1 each she had a bargain and another two books were rescued from the recycling fate.

Someone came in looking for an ‘interesting’ golf book for her son. (Now to my mind there are very few interesting golf books – and all of those were written by P G Wodehouse.)

But such is the drought, that we had none – we who are usually knee deep in golf and cricket books – had none.

After a bit of thought, I persuaded her that a much better idea was the lovely (and it was lovely) hip-flask with St Andrew’s etched on it. Luckily, that was £7.99 of hip flask rather than the usual £2.49 of ‘how to improve your swing’ book.

Upstairs, my stock of book collections is also looking thin.

We still have the box on heraldry and chivalry – based on a generous donation of heraldry books supplemented with anything I can find with a knight on the front.

But we need a centrepiece for the window to go with it, and no one I asked had a suit of armour within their reach….

We have a plan to do a window on the birds and the bees ( no, not a way to sneak in sex) using a few of the lovely bee palaces my fellow volunteer sells. (www.beepalace.com)

But we are short on bee books. Bird books, even lovely ones, are two a penny but there is a shortage, not just of bees, but bee books.

We might have to broaden it out to pollinators and include butterfly books, bat books -hummingbird books at a pinch. But birds and pollinators does not have the same ring to it.

Our manager reckons it is uncertainty about the EU referendum which is causing this drought of donations.

I’m sure in the corridors of power, they are talking about the influence of uncertainty in the referendum, but I bet they are not taking the Oxfam bookshop in Petersfield into account.