Post 394. STILL AVOIDING.

AWARDS CEREMONIES AND...

MOST COMPETITIVE CRAP,
Any doubts that I was becoming my old self again were quickly dispelled once the 2021 awards season began. I do not care who, or what, wins or has won anything this, last, or any other year. I cannot be having with jubilant games winners who hang all over each other in flagrant disregard of pandemic rules, and I long ago tired of award- winning actors winsomely playing the mock modesty role.
To my jaundiced eye, none of it has been helped this year by the racism lobby. Y'know I really don't give a toss what colour, creed, race, or gender an arts/sports person is. I try to maintain good manners to all and deplore discourtesy under whatever guise it may appear. As a consequence I am disconcerted by the intensity of current racial disharmony. I would no more boo a footballer for taking the knee than I would have booed Smith for 'mooning' at the borstal governors in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. The England footballers who were booed recently had a point to make (and so did Smith). I respect that: Pity the feeble-minds who don't.
I also think freedom of speech should not apply only to those with whom you agree: if you dislike what a speaker has to say, don't refuse them the right to say it: just ignore them.
Same goes for picture hanging. Whether Magdalen College, Oxford, takes down or hangs up a picture of the Queen, or any other monarch, is none of my bloody business.
It's no good calling me woke. Woke is 'the past tense of wake' to me.
And don't try labelling me with the 'privileged white Englishman' tag. I was born white, English, working class, and innately bolshie. Went to half a dozen elementary schools between 1935 and 1945, then into the army for close on twelve years, then clerking in the NHS (1957 - 89). Never seemed privileged. Always had somebody to answer to. Was not blessed with the mindset to focus beyond the confines of my own world.
Still find it difficult.
Never mind. All the old farts like me, and that dwindling number who saw action in WW2, will soon be gone.
England will become a fully multiracial nation. Scotland will, too, but all of them will wear the kilt. In Wales they will all sing. Every Welshman can sing: even those who can't (it was the same in Liverpool after The Beatles.became famous).
Ireland and Northern Ireland will probably become the fifty first state of the USA and feel they have more to sing about than any of the Brexiteers ever will.
What?
I know.
How Can You Buy Killarney?

Toodle pip.