Always Look On The Bright Side?

          There’s been a lot of wind and rain lately and it’s been going on for so long it seems now to be the norm. Everyone I meet is looking forward to brighter skies. In the meanwhile, I’ve adopted a coping strategy, which is to time my outings with breaks in the cloud, put on my weatherproofs and sally forth.

          As the rain lashed against the windows one day last week, I was reading through Rory Stewart’s account of his time as an MP and Minister in government (Politics on the Edge). The memoir is entertaining to read, but his descriptions of the incompetence and waste of public funds he encountered are enough to boil the blood of any even marginally engaged citizen. His account of the politically cynical appointment of Ministers, their ignorance of the affairs they are entrusted with, the tenuous terms of their office, their lamentable failures to get to grips with issues of critical importance to the wellbeing of the nation and the resulting waste of billions of taxpayers’ pounds is frightening. As soon as the rain eased, I went out for a stomp to work off my outrage.

          I walked to the park opposite, a grassy hill with the remains of a heavy gun emplacement on its summit. There, against the circular stone wall built to protect the gunners, I found a seemingly abandoned camp. The tent had collapsed and its contents – sleeping bag, mattress, camping stove etc. – were tucked into an alcove built as an ammunition store. I assumed the discarded gear belonged to a homeless person and let it be. Many desperate people pitch their tents in overtly public places so that they stand a better chance of being noticed by the authorities and taken into shelters, but some prefer to pitch wherever they can find a degree of privacy. I waited a few days to satisfy myself that the gear had been abandoned, before collecting it for recycling to an agency that provides tents in place of the proper shelter that is sorely lacking. In the process, I ruminated on how successive governments haplessly attempt to address with sticking plasters what is fundamentally a problem rooted in social inequalities. Could things get worse?

          Well, yes – at least if, like me, you happen also to be reading Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. This fictional account of Gilead, a brutal theonomy established after the disintegration of the USA, may have seemed far-fetched in 1985, its year of publication, but with the subsequent rise of Donald Trump, her prescience is apparent and her premise all too credible. Trump’s fundamentalist Christian backers work to subvert democracy and establish their version of their god’s laws in place of those that have been constitutionally established. Gilead-like states already exist – Afghanistan, for one; could another be in the making closer to home? I know, gloom-and-doom so easily snowballs out of control. I really ought to lighten-up my reading list.

          By way of a diversion, I went with a group from the University of the 3^rd Age to absorb some of the local history of Saltash, specifically H. Elliott’s family-owned grocery shop, which they closed in 1971 rather than have to deal with decimalisation. They subsequently established the shop as a museum and the unsold non-comestible stock remains on the shelves, along with the packages, now empty, of what they could consume. Given the age of our group, much brand-nostalgia and poring over the museum exhibits upstairs (the Elliotts were hoarders) was only to be expected, but I was surprised not to hear anyone mention “the good old days”. Had anyone made a plea for their return, I might at that point have agreed, given my reading-induced pessimistic view of the state of things. But as we left the shop, the chatter was about the rain easing and the tea and cake on offer at our next stop, Mary Newman’s Tudor cottage.