After 11 months of dithering, three nights of barely any sleep, and one day of sweating with guilt in a showroom, I finally bought an electric car. Here’s how it’s been:
Public charging, it turns out, is a piece of piss.
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With the Covid apocalypse continuing to apocalypt, and lockdowns limiting our ability to gather in groups, environmental activism has become slightly tricky. And with yer man The Zero struck down by long Covid his ability to do much of anything has become even trickier, though he remains able to refer to himself creepily in the third person. Happily, Greenpeace is still trying to save us…
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I decided to spend ten days off my tits with fever, and then most of March struggling to breathe, and then half of April self-isolating while I downgraded my cough from persistent to lingering to socially awkward. It’s been frustrating. But I’ve been up and about for a few weeks now, and the old nagging feeling that I should be doing more is kicking back in.
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There are so many reasons to hate Donald Trump they can be overwhelming, hard to narrow down to a more manageable level of hating the prick. There’s the misogyny, the sexual harassment, the sexual assault, the covert racism, the overt racism, the overt white supremacism, the Islamophobia, the transphobia, the bullying, the cruelty, the lies, the hypocrisy, the crushing vanity, the pathetic fragile ego, the ugliness of his heart, the actual ugliness of his fat fucking face, the stupid hair piled on top of the very obvious balding above the actual ugliness of his fat fucking face, the stupid round hole he makes with his mouth when he talks…
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I’m back with another pile of old shite, making this a very definitely sustained comeback. To be fair to me (full disclosure: I am me) I’ve not been entirely inactive, putting together a fundraiser that got five grand for a children’s home in Nepal, but given I can’t get any credit for that on an anonymous blog I’m starting to wonder why I bothered.
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Cards on the table, gang: I’ve spent most of the last 18 months off my tits on painkillers. Not to a Jacko/Prince/stomach-pump degree, but enough to take the edge off my do-gooding and let evil have its way with the world. It’s no coincidence I was out of it when Brexit Brexitted and Trump trumped, when white supremacists showed their faces again, when Nazis rebranded and all manner of clusters were fucked.
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You’ll recall I’ve often said you’ll recall us banging on about the bedroom tax, the government’s effort to reduce the housing benefit bill by giving less housing benefit to people who need it. Here, people lose 14 percent of their benefit for having a spare bedroom and 25 percent for having two spare bedrooms, with the definition of spare rooms including those inhabited by children under the age of ten. It’s a quality piece of work from the people who brought you the knackering of the NHS and the deranged misery of the Atos assessments.
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It’s fair to say I’ve been banging on a bit about poverty recently, what with all those articles about the government assault on welfare and charities covering the gaps and such and such, and while this sentence started out with the intention of apologising for all my banging on it’s looking more like ending on a justification for it because banging on’s what you get for me being around poverty all day and everyone else voting Tory. Poverty, as I was saying, is shit.
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When last we met I was banging on about poverty and how cuts to services are making things worse and how charities are picking up the slack, and getting all right-on and ranty and shooting a barrel-load of fish like a pescatarian Charlton Heston on an all-American killing spree. Perhaps sensing I hadn’t been sufficiently depressed by it all, the welfare rights people in the office set up an information session on how changes to the benefits system are going to affect our service users, a morning about as uplifting as your average bout of bone cancer.
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The thing with this here social work is you see an awful lot of people’s awful lots in life. The stuff you read about and don’t think about and mostly never see. Child abuse, obviously. Domestic violence, like how we talked about. Poverty. Real poverty. Bare floorboards poverty. Eating food or making rent but never both poverty. Oxfam reckons 1 in 5 people in the UK are living below the poverty line, living hard and unhappy lives made harder and unhappier by cuts to services that mean the help they used to get isn’t around any more.
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