Richard Pierce

Richard Pierce – author, poet, painter

Life, Music, Politics, Writing

Day 155

Let’s face it. Self-editing is all very well, but depression knows no self-editing. I slept solidly but badly, if that makes sense, was at my desk here by 7:45 putting together some of the report I need to send to my board on Monday. Then a call from my sister and her German husband to talk about politics during the course of which conversation I woke up M with my loudly-spoken German. The political situation in the UK is too complex for a single simple conversation, and it’s become very obvious to me that our neighbours in Europe look upon the UK with a mix of incredulity and laughter. We are the sick country of Western Europe, a laughing stock. Then a quick breakfast, half of what I was planning, because I was now behind schedule, then my stretches, then my second espresso, and then on air with weary legs, weary head, weary everything. And then an explosion of WhatsApp chats which drove me to despair. This I can and must self-edit.

There is no self-editing depression, just to repeat myself. There’s a catalyst sometimes, although most of the time there isn’t. This time it’s this perception I have of making no progress with anything, of forever being stuck in this damn messy study, of each day being the same, of banging my head against the brick wall the obtuseness of those not interested in politics is, the obtuseness of those who don’t realise or even understand that the Tories have been taking them for a ride for the last 12 years (and for all the years they have been in power before that), the obtuse and self-degrading subservience of those people who really do believe that the current monarch, and the monarchy per se, has been serving the country for as long as it has existed. Sorry, folks, it just hasn’t been. It’s always taken, and it has never ever ever given. Even when monarchs still fought on a battlefield, they didn’t do it for the people, they did it for their own personal gain, except in those days with slightly more risk to personal safety.

And now I am back from having walked into town to meet up with M and I who went down there before I’d come off air. However harsh this sounds and is, there was not a single person I saw who was in the least aesthetically pleasing (actually there was one – a young woman with her dogs on the Heath who smiled at me before I’d manage to uncrumple my frown into a smile). So many people with no sense of real manners (not those rule-book manners made up by the Upper Class to differentiate themselves from the people, not those invented traditions that, if you fail them, will get you banished to the edges of this monarchdom), so many men walking on the inside of the pavements instead of on the edge of the pavement, so many people who really shouldn’t be the size they are (and I know my kids will tell me that I should have self-edited this bit), so many people without masks, without common sense, without anything to mark them out as anything other than sheeple. I am sick of it, so so sick of it. And you all know, you all do really know, deep down, who has made this country the way it is. And this has been going on for centuries.

Nowadays I am only happy with loud music and words around me.

 

AGGIE’S ART OF HAPPINESS – CHAPTER 109

 

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