poat 483. THREE ELECTIONS.

IN A DIFFERENT BRITAIN

FROM THE ONE WHERE I WAS BORN.
Sad but true. It matters not a jot to me that Labour won in Selby and Ainsty, the Liberals won in Somerton and Frome, or that the Conservatives scraped in at Uxbridge and South Ruislip. The country that Messrs Mather and Tuckwell and Ms Dyke are going to Westminster to govern is not the country into which I was born four score years and twelve ago.
I know I have written this before, but it is a sober fact. Throughout my entire childhood the only 'person of colour' upon whom I set eyes was on a cinema screen throwing spears at Tarzan, or singing 'Ol' Man River.' That is now considered a bad thing. We knew no different.
At the elementary school to which I was transferred at around six or seven years, little lads were still arriving barefoot and being fitted out with council boots so nobody would be in any doubt they were from a family too poor to afford shoes like the rest of us. It was that sort of means testing little country, and there are those today who, given the chance, would reintroduce it tomorrow. Empathy? Huh! But it does mean, whatever your race, creed, or colour, that I no more need a media lecture on discrimination from you than I need to hear some fanciful bullshitter sounding off about 'the good old days.' It was not a better country then, it was a different country. It's just more crowded now. And I do not like crowds. Crowds breed gangs and gangs breed bullies, and the biggest bullies get to the top. You only have to appraise the powerful in politics to confirm that.
So, even though I respect the views embraced by kind-hearted Brits in the media (more of them from abroad every year) that there is always room here, and there is loads of money here, and we are an accepting nation here, as a person of no firm political - or much other - belief, I do sometimes wonder how right they are. Is the struggle to rehouse the population of entire countries simply playing into the hands of the bullies who make those countries uninhabitable? And there's good and bad, even in a shifting population. But what else can we do?

Most of my contemporaries are dead and buried or incinerated, so I am too old to do anything.
Of all the mistakes I have made the biggest was in not doing as Maureen suggested, when we were  newly married, and try to emigrate to New Zealand. I weakly argued that a go-ahead country would not want an ex army wireless operator, they only wanted qualified tradesmen.
So we stayed put and, thankfully, both we and our surviving children have managed. But Maureen would have loved, even to have seen, New Zealand, and I didn't give her the chance.
I'm sorry about that. It clearly is a beautiful country, give or take the occasional earthquake.
Meanwhile, midst the same shrill voices of dissent in the the UK, my sole ray of cheer is... 

THE PROMS.

Where last night yet another of my wish list was ticked when Max Bruch's Violin Concerto No.1 was played by brilliant South Korean violinist Bomsori with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by lively German conductor Anja Bihimaier. Bomsori delighted the Proms audience with an encore by a Polish composer. The rest of the programme consisted of the now customary mixture: i.e. the tuneful and the tuneless, the former to musically entertain and the latter to assertively educate. I'll settle for the former any time. Give us a tune, kid, give us a tune.

That's it for this month.

Even for those who play the fiddle.

Be lucky.