Nobbut Laiking, by Ross Brewster
Did we all utter the magic words “white rabbits” on the first of the month?
More in hope than expectation I suspect, for as 2024 moves towards its conclusion I can’t remember a year in which, consistently, we have been mired in a slough of such despondency.
It depresses me — and I lived through the misery of the 1970s when we had strikes, spiralling inflation, and when the lights literally went out over Britain.
For a start it’s rained most of the year. For people taking summer holidays in areas like the Lake District, and for people like farmers whose productivity is weather-related, it was unutterably wet, day in and day out. If that’s not depressing I don’t know what is.
After riots and protests on the streets they said it would all look a great deal better once we had an election and got rid of the Tories. But what followed Labour’s landslide victory? A prime minister whose every appearance spells doom and gloom.
We are constantly reminded what a mess we’re in. No sunlit uplands for us. Just black holes of debt left over from the new government’s predecessors.
NHS waiting lists, violent crime, housing shortages. All part of the sense of foreboding. So desperate are we for something positive to emerge we even damned the budget with faint praise like “could have been worse”.
The Government has delivered a non-stop barrage of grimness, working on the premise that all 2024’s woes will be long forgotten by the time they face the electorate again in 2029.
Since Covid thousands of workers have adopted a three-day week and many of them work from home and rarely if ever see their colleagues face to face in the office. The public knows just how hard it is these days to connect with another human.
Like older readers I remember when the three-day week was compulsory rather than a matter of choice. Miners and rail workers were on strike and there was a shortage of coal to run the power stations. Towns and cities fell dark, factories and schools closed, people were pictured working by candlelight and the TV shut down early to conserve electricity.
Those of us working for newspapers still had to turn in and report the bad news. Printing presses were exempt from the closures. I was writing about football at the time and remember going to lunchtime games when floodlights were banned.
No mobile phones to help us while away the hours. They had not been invented. No computer games. No computers. It was a case of making your own amusement from what little there was left to amuse. Mind I seem to remember a spike in the birth rate.
Fifty years ago I think we were more resilient. Yes, there was some unrest. But most of us just got on with it.
It would make a welcome change in this year of 2024 if the Government gave us some good cheer. Something to blow away the clouds of unremitting disappointment. Those of a certain age have had enough winters of discontent for one lifetime. Let’s at least see the year out with a smile. I’m relying on those white rabbits for a change of fortune. Prime Minister, are you listening?
Sign of the times
It caught my eye when I was watching one of those repeats of The Sweeney on television, the cop programme which had John Thaw and Dennis Waterman bashing the villains in their inimitable roles as Regan and Carter of the Flying Squad.
As the chase went through a car park there was a sign saying Free Parking. In the centre of the city. Any motorist will tell you there’s no such thing as a free car park nowadays. Parking fines. It’s a racket. Hotels, supermarkets, any spare bit of ground are all farmed out to anonymous collection agencies. So that when you complain they say “it’s nothing to do with us, we don’t run the car parks any more”.
Readers may recall my brush with a parking fine some weeks ago after I had stayed overnight as a “guest” of a well-known hotel chain. I appealed against the £100 charge and surprise, surprise, won. The charge was cancelled. They don’t actually use the word “fine”.
The message is, if you are in the right then fight.
A future PM?
I’ve had a quiet fiver on Rachel Reeves to be our next Prime Minister after her confident delivery of the budget.
She did it with nothing more sustaining than a glass of water, too. Previous Chancellors were known for their tipple. Churchill liked his brandy, Gladstone sherry and beaten eggs, an old fell runners’ pre-race concoction, and Ken Clarke was a whisky man.
Rachel should forget the comedy. She’s no Victoria Wood. But she was seen later in a nearby pub, drink in hand, soaking up the cheers of fellow MPs.
On the fly
Favourite Hallo’ween story concerns a woman in Cornwall who objected to the local planning authority over a development near her home. She claimed the building would interfere with her line of flight. The council could not brush that one off easily.
