Ava-Jane bit
With Otto now at Uni, we have been hanging out more intensively with Ava-Jane. We all miss him loads but with only one child in the house and one who is in a wheelchair, rather than self-propelled, there’s a lot less chivvying going on in general – it’s much easier to wheel Ava-Jane to the dinner table than to rouse Otto from his room. We had a sad moment the other day, when Fo, Ava-Jane and I sat down for a meal, and AJ instinctively called out for Otto, but we had to tell her that he wasn’t there. Otto is having a great time at Uni and seems to have really fallen on his feet.
We are certainly watching more Strictly Come Dancing and less football now that women are in the majority in the household. Ava-Jane absolutely adores Strictly. She likes game shows in general, anything that involves lots of clapping and cheering, which is why she likes sport. And, of course, Strictly takes the clapping and cheering to stratospheric levels. As an example of how AJ’s communication skills are improving, she very clearly told me that she wanted dance in the sitting room – dance jiggle from AJ and then pointing towards the sitting room. So, I thought she wanted one of our Ava-Jane and Dad dance sessions. I took her down to the sitting room, cranked up the music, and twirled her round the room. But then she told me, “No” and pointed at the TV and did her dance jiggle. She hadn’t wanted to dance with me, she wanted to watch Strictly.
I went clothes shopping for me the other day and took AJ as my consultant. I love wandering around Milton Keynes with Ava-Jane. She brings such happiness to people when they engage with her. Lots of people really don’t engage as they are probably worried about staring at the little girl in the wheelchair but every so often she’ll really grab somebody’s attention and they will interact with her and you just know that that person’s day will have been just a bit jollier from having interacted with Ava-Jane.
One person we met was a girl with Down’s Syndrome who was working at the checkout in Waitrose. She really liked Ava-Jane. She had been working there for 15 years or so and obviously really enjoyed it. It’s a shame that Ava-Jane won’t be able to have a job like that – I am sure that if she hadn’t had the brain damage, she would have been able to enter the workforce like this girl had.
But I do have a plan. Fo’s mum, who very sadly passed away recently, more on that below, had been in a nursing home on and off recently. Ava-Jane visited her on a few occasions and when she was there, she interacted with the old residents and brought great cheer, of course. So this is my plan for Ava-Jane’s future career – a nursing home visitor and general bringer of joy. I mean they have dogs and alpacas that visit nursing homes, so why not Ava-Jane? …I might have made up the alpacas, but that’s a pretty good idea too on reflection.
We went on an excursion to Stowe School the other day, with my dear old buddy Ali and her daughter, Hannah, my goddaughter. If you don’t know Stowe, it is the most preposterous school imaginable. It’s a stately home, seat of the Duke’s of Buckingham, of Buckingham Palace fame – they liked a big pad. It’s set in the most beautiful parkland imaginable, see pictures. There’s an exhibition on to commemorate D-Day, which consists of silhouette cut-outs representing each of the 1,400 or so people who fell on the first day of the invasion of France. It was very moving, though I have to admit that Ava-Jane enjoyed the ice-cream eating part of the outing most of all.
Politics bit
Labour have been utterly shit. I was going to say that they “literally had one job” but that wouldn’t be fair. They had lots of jobs and they screwed up a fair few of them – more on that later. But one of their jobs was not to be as sleazy as the Tories. And they have been sleazy. That it’s an entirely different order of sleaze is by-the-by. They really shouldn’t have been accepting gifts from anyone and given their central message was that it we are heading for a few years of gloom, they would have been well advised to turn out in sackcloth rather than any fancy pants get-ups kindly sponsored by some entirely disinterested billionaire. I don’t know much about billionaires but I imagine that they don’t generally give their money away without expecting something back – surely that’s not how you become a billionaire.
They knew that the Tory press would go for them, and go for them they have. It’s of course unfair but this lot are supposed to be the experts in RealPolitik and this is our reality. They shouldn’t be comparing themselves with the Tories when it comes to abstinence, of course Johnson was up to his neck in freebies and sleaze, they should be comparing themselves to Mother Teresa. (Though Mother Teresa was no Mother Teresa it transpires.*) The right-wing papers were inevitably going to confect all sorts of nonsense and when they try to nobble you for sensibly organising a police escort for a pop star, who recently had to cancel a concert because of a terrorist threat, you’d be better off not having accepted free tickets to that pop star’s concert. Because someone on the Daily Mail or GB News is going to try to make out that she bought the police protection in exchange for the free tickets. And don’t then talk to this pop star because this is somehow also a scandal, though I can’t quite work out why. Politicians have been hanging out awkwardly with pop stars since at least when Harold Wilson was snapped puffing his pipe with the Beatles, and who could forget the dreadful Cool Britannia moment when Tony Blair had various Brit Poppers round to Number 10?
Another complete mess is the winter fuel debacle. For the happily uninitiated, this is either a very sensible measure where free give-away money from the government to pensioners to help them pay for extra heating costs during the winter is now only going to go to those who genuinely need it, or a cruel act of revenge on the one sector of the electorate who didn’t vote for Labour, i.e. pensioners.
They should have just said that they were taking away the winter fuel payment because it was no longer needed as they were going to be insulating everyone’s houses so we would all be warm and toastie and chuck in that they were starting with the oldies’ homes so they would look more human.
But it seems like Labour had spent so much time being an effective opposition that they have been a bit flummoxed by the actual doing government bit. I do hope they get better. This country really needs to have a government in place that starts fixing things and can demonstrate that they are fixing things and communicate this clearly so that we can all cheer up a bit. As I have said before, we just need a time of a bit dull competence.
But if dull competence is not your thing and you want a bit of fun back on the UK political scene, hold on to your hats if Kemi Badenoch becomes leader of the opposition. She will be a lark. The other fella is so grey, he is virtually translucent – he will say anything to climb the greasy pole. But Kemi believes it – she is a true culture warrior. She says whatever is on her mind and what’s on her mind is often pretty offensive. She’ll probably blow up before we get to the next election but it’ll be a ride, I wager.
This blog has put Johnson behind itself, to everyone’s great relief, I am sure. But this did make me titter: the great man’s autobiography, Unleashed (like was he ever actually leashed??), failed to be delivered to a bookshop in Brussels because of Brexit red tape! I am sure the good burghers of Brussels are pining at the loss of such a great tome.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eurocrats-boris-johnson-memoir-brexit/
Trish
As a family we have been through a pretty hard time over the last few months. Fo’s Mum Trish died after having been ill for a few months. She’d not really been very well for a number of years and it is easy to forget the woman she was. She wasn’t the woman in the wheelchair, she was the woman who dangled Fo upside down, she was the woman who won mad rally mountain driving competitions, travelled the world and organised all sorts of events, most notably, in our case, our wedding. I had always imagined that your own wedding would be a bit of a nightmare, involving all sorts of stresses and strains. But Trish wasn’t one to get overly flustered by anything, so if we wanted it be a party in a field, with assorted Spaniards playing crucial roles, she took it all in her stride and threw the most wonderful wedding that I have ever had, no, seriously, I enjoyed my wedding more than I ever thought I would and that was hugely thanks to Trish.
- See Fake Heroes by Otto English
Misliterature 