The end of summer (again)

With apologies to Tim Dowling for stealing his schtick and with thanks for the inspo.

My house is starting to show its age. I appreciate it’s not quite the Georgian or Victorian stock in which I spent the first four decades of my life, it was built in 2011, but it’s not fantastically well constructed (or designed), the finishings are cheap and things are falling apart.

As is my wont in summer, I try to stem the inexorable tugs of entropy. I’ve had the one shower (of the house’s three bathrooms) replaced at considerable cost. I’ve had some of the windows repainted on the outside. The top ones are too difficult to reach without scaffolding which would require me to sell a kidney. Obviously, most of the garden is dead after the summer we’ve had.

I’ve yet to do anything about the kitchen tap that has been leaking from its base for approximately nine years. I’ve yet to do anything about the seal of the freezer door which I’ve identified as the cause of the disappointing accumulation of frost on the drawers and most of the contents (some of which I will not see again until I defrost the thing).

I love the new shower so much. I sometimes go into the en suite of my daughter’s bedroom where it stands just to look at it.

I have sent an antique clock to be repaired, and will reclaim that when I can afford it.

I have had a treasured tea towel framed and it is proudly displayed in my hallway.

The carpets with the cat pee stains will have to be the next owner’s problem. Caveat emptor. Ditto internal decoration.

Which is my way of saying, I’m doing my best. As with child rearing as a single parent, it’s not an exact science. But I do get to sleep at night thinking that if I go under a bus the following day, I’ll have tried my hardest to earn a living, be a decent person, have some fun and raise two young adults who will, somehow, be ok in the world. Much as I fret about what sort of a world I’ve brought them into. And with assisted dying back in the news, and an eye on my non-pension, my take on the issue is it sounds like a great idea, to be gently eased out of the world when illness and disability become too much to bear.

I had some lifechanging chats with friends while camping. I’ve been to a festival, which was sublime as always.

I’m glad to see the autumn but sorry to lose the long, sunny days. Of course, it’s been too hot and one side of the garden is a dead, depressing mess. I saw the news about El Nino and predictions that next summer is going to be even hotter than this year. We do need to radically rethink how we use and store water; what we grow in our gardens and all the rest of it. There are bigger brains than mine charged with all this. Can they please just get on with it.

In other news

It’s been a busy end to a busy summer, work-wise, as my colleague @Myra Johnson and I launched a new brand and website for the Good Faith Partnership, which you can see here. Hopefully this explains to friends and former colleagues what Good Faith actually does – we bring people together to tackle complex social challenges.

Elsewhere in the media, Gordon Brown has been doing the rounds plugging his new book.  He was on the Today programme on 26 August when he talked about local communities in the UK and across the western world where he thinks the breakdown in a sense of community is allowing the Far Right to take hold, which makes a lot of sense. He also mentioned the Warm Welcome Campaign, a network of 6,000+ community spaces which Good Faith resources, champions and connects through the Warm Welcome Campaign.

I think what Brown is saying (I’ve yet to get a copy of the book) is that in the absence of a real sense of community support and community cohesion, people will turn to parties like Reform who are saying (wrongly) that they will help with issues that concern people, whether it’s immigration, the cost of living or whatever. I find it hugely ironic that Reform is running the county council in Kent where residents around Tunbridge Wells (my old stomping ground) have run out of water in their homes twice in recent memory because of South East Water’s lack of investment in local treatment works.

Here’s Brown in the Guardian, with a more international take on his thoughts.

I’m just so bored by the way people disagree in the world. Believing the market is the answer to everything and hence privatising water companies which has led to the catastrophic failure to invest in water infrastructure in the UK. Or believing in the state, which led to (so I’m told, I was young at the time) British Rail being a bit of a shitshow. Was it really so much worse than train travel in the heatwaves which caused two derailments and ridiculous journeys for thousands of people without aircon where people had to get off at every stop, just to cool down before clambering back into super-heated carriages?

We were promised progress as young people, not retrograde steps.

I’m also annoyed about capitalism and the education system in this country. Now that my girls are 24 and almost 22, what prospects are there for them? To get locked into working every weekday from at least 9 to 5 (RIP, Dolly), barely scraping by in a job they hate with a toxic workplace culture and toxic people?

How do I handle their idealism, with the planet literally burning in front of our eyes? Btw I saw two young people in Salisbury the other night walking with a placard that said: “There is no climate disaster.” It was a sorry sight indeed. They might as well have had a sign that said: “The world is flat.”

I could go on, but you must have had enough by now. I have a whole set of notes about why the Left in Britain must be stronger, less hand-wringing etc. At least Andy Burnham is offering us hope, at the moment. My hope is that he is given time to deliver. My state of mind will be better next month, after some more sleep, I promise. Toodle pip.