Horse, Andrew Neil and my cats.

Today is a sunny day, still cold, but bright.  I feel the greatest reward will be to the plants.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, just.  PMQ’s today was missable.  The Daily Politics quite watchable, only because of the nice lady from Holland, Sophie.  What I enjoyed most was how normal she seemed, a normal lady, casually discussing European lifestyles, the global decline of natural resources, and a crisis not of currencies but of leadership.  She was pretty fit, too. 

Her counter-punching guest was some grey-haired stuff-n-nonsense UKIP type – a real twat – going on about foreigners telling him what to do.  He interrupted Sophie more than once, and she told him politely not to speak while she was speaking, which seemed fair and reasonable.  Then I realised that just about any figure in British political life could have sat opposite Sophie and seemed at least as ridiculous; it’s a type, and of this type we have a lot.

I know this because I was one.  An argumentative only-child, in a single-parent family.  I don’t suppose all single-parent only-children are argumentative, but I was. I started as a child whose mother voted Conservative and spoke only English, of a northern sort.  Her family, being northern, all voted Labour.  They were Trades Unionists, and caught buses for a very long and unfashionable time.

It was unfashionable being a Tory at school, but I was one, and probably the poorest Tory boy in the school.  But I was one.  I made up for my isolation by being opinionated and attention-seeking, regrettably racist and in favour of hanging.  “I’ll hang him myself” I said to a group of six-formers.

How do I live with that? Man. 

I put it down to being misguided.  Nowadays we ought to call it bad parenting.  We are biologically at least half of all we are.  Not just the stuff, but the memories you have of having things done to you, and being unable to stop them happening.  For at least a decade. Then a decade or two of rejection.  The last decade something of an acceptance, I suppose.  At least a healing. 

I parted with some DNA that become independently sustaining.

I concede, I have to think a lot harder than I used to, but I understand that the harder you think about something, the better the results will be.  It can be difficult to consider many things together.  So much of what is expected is invasive, alien and brutal, and so many of the things we do are affected by what is expected of us: you must choose a gas and electricity supplier, for example.  For fuck’s sake. 

It’s not only my money that pays for the bombs to support our economic franchise. 

I have to think about what’s best for my cats.  We might casually expect to find horse in cat food, I for one would not mind. I’ve eaten ready meals.  If they were able, my cats would choose to live in a world where they won’t get fried in an atomic holocaust.  Cat’s can be choosy animals at best, but you can forgive them for not believing there’s goodness in most pet food.  We don’t ask.  We eat ready meals.

I used to eat chips cooked in refried lard. If my mother had been Polly Toynbee, I might’ve had Herefordshire Lard.  There’s nothing I can do about that, now. 

“I shouldn’t be surprised, Smith, if there’s any meat in this at all.”

And of course, ‘you are what you eat.’ 

Maybe Britons would be better off eating horse.  Anything but shit.