Dr Who was on last night and I watched it. I almost didn’t because it was a Dalek story and Dalek stories bore me now because they’ve been so overused. As it happens, I’m glad I did watch it because, a couple of gripes aside, it was both a decent episode and a better Dalek story than I expected. The gripes? The early part of the script and the clever, but rushed denouement. All the bits in the middle were fun, even the bits that recycled bits of earlier stories. Also, it was good to have Jodie Whittaker back on screen. Whatever issues I have with the current Doctor stories, they’re not with Jodie.
Afterwards, I completed, belatedly, the New Scientist Christmas cryptic crossword, which was surprisingly satisfying.
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I was chatting earlier with an old colleague and friend about this and that and he offered an interesting take on Brexit. He runs a cluster of small businesses doing a lot of business representing clients in Scandinavia and the Baltic states. He said he was despondent yesterday but has perked up because a lot of small businesses with whom he works are actively looking for ways to keep working together and make things work.
I still think it’s too early to properly grasp the practical consequences of Brexit, but it was nice to hear a bit of optimism from someone at the sharp end of services rather than goods provision.
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I’m preparing some 1971 music posts for the next stage of the project. The preparation has consisted of trying to pin down release dates for some records on Vertigo which some sources say were January 1971 (which might also be inferred from the catalogue numbers) but other sources say later in the year. In the end I suppose it doesn’t matter, but I like to be reasonably close to the actual release date if I can.
One of the fine releases later in 1971 was The Gypsy by Mr Fox. It was their second and last album as the band disintegrated with the marriage of Bob and Carolanne Pegg. I’ve been listening to her 1973 solo album Carolanne this afternoon. When I first heard it I wasn’t taken at all by her voice. This afternoon I enjoyed it. Funny how that happens. I listened on cd; the cheapest copy of the original vinyl on Discogs is £45 + postage from the Netherlands; a mint copy in the UK is offered at £100.
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I was pleased earlier to sit out the front for a while. Even though it was -2C and I wore two fleeces, the sun was bright and warm enough in our little suntrap to let me take some fresh cold air under an unending blue sky. We had unexpected snow overnight but it seems to be thawing. I’ve avoided going for a walk for a couple of nights because the pavements have been treacherous: I may yet go out this evening.
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Music: Bubbling under the chart this week in 1971: The Equals Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys.
Almost exactly 3 years ago, I received the results of a consumer DNA test linked to my sloth-like family tree research. I posted about it at the time. Shortly after that, in March 2017, I posted a map produced by the company showing my genetic markers within the UK. In the latter post I commented that
Also, because the company that did it doesn’t have good reference data for Ireland yet, I have reason to believe the map might change on later re-examination when that reference data becomes available.
I got the update results through today, and I was right: addition of Irish data has made a difference. I knew it would because of the Heaney family in the mid-nineteenth century. What I didn’t expect was the new North and West Europe markers (tagged Northwest Germanic), and the reshuffling of the British regional markers.
Autosomal Me
On the face of it, this is a refreshed set of data for the last 10 generations or so, to the extent that the markers have been shuffled up and passed to me via Mum and Dad. I daresay it is accurate in that sense. The problem is I only have paper records for some of it and, in most cases, only back to around 1800 (1745/6 in the best). This puts some of these markers safely before I have evidence, and without the other evidence they don’t get me very far.
From a genealogical perspective, without a paper trail, this is just a curiosity, as is my mtDNA and yDNA make up. From a much broader and more political perspective, it helps give the lie to the petty nonsenses of nationalism. Like every other human being on the planet, what links me to everyone else is overwhelmingly more than the supposed divisions between us.
In a post in July 2016 I suggested the conservatives would have a substantial majority until 2025 at the earliest. I made a partial recantation of that in May this year when Mrs. May went. Given the results of GE 2019, I may as well jump on the bandwagon of everyone else with a hot take and claim I was right all along and the last GE was a blip.
One thing I’ve been certain of for a long time, though, is that Labour were dead in the water the moment Corbyn became ‘leader’. I said this on Twitter several times, for example:
I’ve also long held the view that it is not sufficient for a government to be unpopular and incompetent; for it to change there also has to be a credible alternative waiting to step into office. As matters stand, only one of those conditions has been in place for a very considerable time. Hence last night’s result.
Also as matters stand, I am politically homeless and have been for some time.
The morning after an election is a strange place, especially on social media. It was the morning after the last US Presidential election that I ditched Facebook. My Twitter feed has benefited the last few days from (a) not logging in much and (b) muting accounts that were full-on politics. My current view is that a wholesale reallignment of my Twitter feed is coming, and for similar reasons to my ditching of Facebook: I don’t need the daily negativity.
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Added: Blog posts I ought to be arsed to write but probably won’t:
1: The malign influence of Grauniad columnists on left-of-centre UK politics from the SDP debacle to date.
2: Why traditional notions of working class attitudes have been wrong since Margaret Thatcher’s successes from 1979 onwards (something Tony Blair understood). In particular, the ‘working class’, to the extent that the category is valid, is not and never has been ‘socialist’.
It’s a strange one. All elections have their oddities, but this one more than most: everyone claims they don’t really want it, but we’ve got it anyway; the parties are campaigning on all sorts of policy announcements, but we all know its about Brexit. In my case, casting my vote is essentially by picking the least worst, and that is, for me, decided by simple calculation at the consituency level.
The first election I was able to vote in was in May 1979, when Callaghan’s Labour government was defeated by Thatcher’s Conservatives. I voted Labour in that election and at almost every one subsequently. I have said for some time now that I will not vote Labour again while Jeremy Corbyn or his outriders have control of party and policy. Having said that, were I in, for example, Birmingham Yardley or Leicester West, I’d vote for Jess Philips or Liz Kendall without hesitation.
But I’m not in either of those constituencies, I’m in Edinburgh West which, these days, is Lib. Dem/SNP marginal. When I first came here it was held by the Lord James Douglas-Hamilton for the Conservatives (on old consituency boundaries). I don’t like the Lib. Dems. I don’t like the enthusiasm with which they propped up the first Cameron government and its economic illiteracies; I don’t like their casual approach to presentation of statistics in election advertising; and I don’t like their technocratic approach to policy. In fact they have only one thing in their favour in this constituency–they’re not the SNP.
A couple of posts back, David McGovern left a comment regarding respecting the result of the Brexit referendum if you don’t agree with the the outcome. This is something I considered here in July 2016 and here.
We’re now three and a half years, two general elections and three Conservative leaders distant from the referendum. What the passing of time and circumstance has made clear is that the referendum result was for a principle and direction but devoid of any meaningful detail on the practical outcome. To the extent that the promoters of the policy did specify detail, they have been shown to be wrong. I think respecting the result of the referendum in the abstract is one thing, but accepting it in the abstract does not entail accepting any old bullshit that May or Johnson put before us.
So my vote this time will be going the same way as last time, but for slightly different reasons. I want to vote to reject the version of Brexit that the hard-right of the Conservatives is promoting, and I’m not interested in Corbynistas. So my choice is either Lib. Dem. or SNP (the Greens in Scotland are just the SNP with allotments). That makes the Lib. Dems. a pragmatic, if unenthusiastic, choice as the least-worst.
I’ve been silent on the subject of politics for a while, pretty much by choice. I’m pondering a post on the B Word, but for now this by Professor Chris Grey pretty much entirely encapsulates my view.
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