Anybody who has worked in any sort of office job will be familiar with the phrase “death by powerpoint” to describe the arse-numbing boredom of sitting in one place while being subjected to a stream of bar charts and bullet points. This week I coined the phrase “death by democracy” when faced with a local […]
Entries Tagged as 'Politics'
Death by Democracy
July 13th, 2024 · No Comments · Life, Politics
Tags: Crawley Council·Elections·Labour
Politically engaged?
June 23rd, 2024 · No Comments · Politics
I’m still not sure whether I count as politically engaged. I always vote in general elections, which should put me in the top 70%. I also vote in local elections, which probably makes me more engaged than the 60% (?) who don’t. I belong to a political party which must indicate a fair level of […]
Tags: Elections
Avoidable deaths
June 26th, 2023 · Comments Off on Avoidable deaths · Life, Politics
This story caught my attention on the radio news this morning (“UK’s high rate of avoidable deaths linked to NHS woes”) and I think the headline is more than a bit misleading. Read a bit further and it says “The UK had one of the lowest levels of life expectancy – although the study acknowledged […]
Tags: Cancer·Medicine/Health
It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)
July 8th, 2020 · Comments Off on It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine) · Life, Politics
There is a lot of change coming. Some of it necessitated by the Covid-19 experience and some of it self-inflicted by Brexit. I do try to embrace change and welcome it because, like most people, I want things to keep improving and improvement implies change. Conversely, any change represents an opportunity to twist it into […]
Nostalgic for Thatcher and Reagan
July 7th, 2020 · Comments Off on Nostalgic for Thatcher and Reagan · Politics
If you went back to the mid-80s and told me that one day I would be nostalgic for Reagan and Thatcher in another 35 years I would have refused to believe it, but here we are and we have a president of the US I would swap for Reagan in a heartbeat and a British […]
Tags: Coronavirus
Some selected quotes
September 28th, 2019 · Comments Off on Some selected quotes · Life, Politics
I just had a look at the ‘My Clippings’ section on my Kindle and seen all the bits of text that I have highlighted over the years. Some of them are quite random, but a few are worth dwelling on.
Tags: Quotes
Another dodgy Brexit analogy
March 8th, 2019 · Comments Off on Another dodgy Brexit analogy · Life, Politics
Last year we helped our daughter move house. She was downsizing from the flat she had been sharing with her brother, into a tiny bedsit in the city. We had hired a van so drove it down to Hampshire and when we got there we expected everything to be as it was when we last […]
Tags: Brexit
Walls old and new
February 18th, 2019 · Comments Off on Walls old and new · Life, Politics
While Donald Trump continues to try building his pointless wall, later this year it will thirty years since the Berlin Wall came down. Thirty years – where did it all go? It was an exciting time. One girl from our office went straight out and booked a flight to Berlin so she could see the […]
Tags: Nostalgia
2018: not a total write-off
January 3rd, 2019 · Comments Off on 2018: not a total write-off · Life, Music, Politics
In many respects 2018 was a year to forget. The news was almost entirely bad, and sometime so bad it was funny, with a number of headlines that would have been dismissed by Chris Morris for being too ridiculous. Brexit was tearing apart the country, the government and the opposition, and fillingup the news every […]
Tags: 2018
Keeping Crawley Open House open
September 2nd, 2018 · Comments Off on Keeping Crawley Open House open · Life, Politics
There was a bit of a shock in the West Sussex county council’s new forward plan when it was published this week. The wording is all quite bland and might not sound like much, but the implications are that several services in the county will not be able to afford to continue, including the Crawley […]