Jul 20, 2024 | Books, Legs!
It’s been an odd few weeks. I hadn’t done much in the way of exercise since early June, first because of the time demands of a family wedding and second because, as soon as the wedding was celebrated, Kirstin and I both came down with colds that lingered. I’ve been around the block enough times to know that exercising before the body has recovered is a bad idea, so it was only last week that I went into the swimming pool a couple of times and, yesterday, into the gym.
The gym was busy so I didn’t do my full routine, but I did enough to find out the hard way that I’ve lost a bit of strength on the free weights. The plus side is that my previous efforts with free weights and upper body work made the return to the pool less difficult than it might have been. Anyway, I took a turn on a treadmill yesterday – set at an incline and a decent walking pace. On a whim, I also did some light jogging, basically the equivalent of 1km, my first attempt at jogging since the knee problem emerged in February. Happily, I had no reaction in my knee when on the treadmill and haven’t had any today.
I am well aware that I am not ready to go back to running, but I am pleased that I appear to be in a better place than I was five months ago.
Plenty of walking today, and a nap this afternoon. My knee may not have reacted, but the rest of me did.
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Recent reading
Two new novels formed my reading this week, both quite different.
Paulo Bacigalupi’s Navola is a dark fantasy, grimdark even, that requires close attention. It’s a mashup of renaissance banking and trade, Rome and The Godfather. I enjoyed it a lot and look forward to the sequel in due course.
Deborah Harkness’s The Black Bird Oracle is nowhere near as deep or subtle, but it is an enjoyable page-turner. It doesn’t have the historical depth of the first two books in the sequence (A Discovery of Witches and The Shadow of Night) but that’s OK. I’m not being slighting – it was an enjoyable read after the more hardcore Navola.
Both books are waystations as I finish the current story collection and the back of my mind turns to the next novel or two. More on that later.
Jul 7, 2024 | Dead Water
I have a backlog of things to write about here; I’m going to get the General Election out of the way first.
I spent all day on Thursday 4th working at a local polling station. I got there just before 06.00 and got home around 22.45. I really enjoyed it, although I underestimated how tired I’d be when I got home. The two main things I was worried about – the first election in Scotland requiring ID and my task of receiving (or rejecting) postal votes – weren’t big issues at all. Almost everybody who turned up to vote (earliest at 07.00, last at 21.56) brought appropriate ID and we were busy throughout the day. Most voters were cheerful and determined, more than outweighing the one or two who were taciturn bordering on rude.
My plan was to get home, have a nap, and see some of the results come in, whisky in hand. In the event I was so tired that I got home, had something to eat, and slept for 10 hours. I woke up to find that both the Conservatives and the SNP had been stuffed, trussed and roasted like Christmas turkeys.
Good.
It wasn’t the Tory wipe out many of us wanted, but I’ll settle for their humiliation. Fingers crossed that the SNP get their just deserts at the next Holyrood election.
As for what happens now with the Starmer administration, my view is that there are no major policy areas, domestic or international, that should not be recast as a matter of urgency in the context of uncontrolled climate change. This is also the context for rebuilding social institutions near-destroyed by the Tories, institutions that ought to provide some resilience and mitigation in the face of current and coming climate change impacts. The incoming government must also have strategies in place to respond to the Russia/N Korea/China axis and the slow collapse of the USA.
There is no logical way that any such objectives can succeed unless the government pursues a strategy of strengthening ties with Europe.
It remains to be seen whether Starmer’s Labour are up to the job – I don’t think they were put on the spot about *any* of the above during the campaign: serious discussion of climate change and Europe was carefully excluded from all public debate by the big players, perhaps because they don’t grasp it? Lobby correspondents, generalists all, certainly don’t grasp the bigger issues. Discussion, such as it has been, has revolved around ‘Green’ issues in the abstract and the political/industry fiction of Net Zero. That has to change, if only because reality is likely to force a change in the lifetime of this Parliament, so best start now.
In the meantime, I don’t think our media commentators have sufficiently grasped what a paradigm-shifting event the new Parliament is. Most of the ‘informed’ analysis I’ve seen has continued to use the conceptual language of the old paradigm despite it now being redundant. This is true for the Right, shell-shocked by the scale of their rejection, and the Left, furious that Labour under Starmer won.
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