So, I’ve been contemplating a lot of things, 10 miles of running / walking around yesterday with little company but my head, and yet I can’t actually remember what it was I was going to write about. Perhaps some updates on things will make me remember.
The DAF may be ready to be collected today or tomorrow – which’ll be nice. I’ll hopefully be able to collect her and get a shiny new MOT on the way home. That would lead to 75% of vehicles in our household being MOT’d. That would be quite nice. I’d forgotten the joy I get from driving classics, having been driving moderns for such a long time. The volvo is very pleasant to drive, and is sort of border-line classic, but there’s something visceral about driving an older classic. Something about being a part of the world, closely linked and experiencing it. It’s as near to riding a motorbike as you can get without riding one.
I’m becoming weaker though, heated seats and quiet appeal to me more than they used to :)
I actually enjoyed the drive back from the garage, despite the fear edging on my consciousness that I would at some point be stopped by the police. For while it says that you may drive an untaxed/mot’d vehicle to or from an MOT and from an MOT directly to a place of repair, my route (since I got lost) may not have been considered ‘direct’, and anyone looking at the two page failure sheet might have declared the vehicle dangerous to drive.
It wasn’t, obviously, all but 3 of the faults had been rectified, and 3 of them were faults which impacted only the structural strength of the vehicle in an accident. I was quite surprised by the size of one of the holes, actually, which must have been there last year, but was well hidden. One gets the impression that he wanted to fail the vehicle, and spent time looking carefully for things to fail it on, because of where the failure points were. Still, valid they are (well, borderline, in terms of distance from mountings, but they needed to be done), and thus I await the call from the welder.
As I discussed with him, it’s silly really, I should just live with riding the motorbike in the rain for a few weeks, but at least this way, when Rebecca does come back, I can sell the DAF as a going concern. While I’ll doubtless barely recoupe the cost of the last set of repairs, I will have a car for a few weeks, and that’s cheaper than hiring.
Ah, yes. Whiny ranting. That’s what I wanted to get to.
So, I know that part of the problem for me is that I want to leave this country. That does not make one prone to seeing the best in the place that you’re in. I want to be in Canada, and so I look around and see things that support my decision to leave. And one of those things is what appears to be growing support for the scary conservatives.
Now, I do not for a moment think that the Conservative party are guaranteed a win in the UK, but the fact that it’s a possible discussion point makes me depressed. They’re clearly insane, having apparently suggested that older people going into care will now only need to make an £8500 contribution to their lifelong care. Um, since they’re currently having to sell their houses (to make, say, a £175,000 contribution) I’m slightly interested to hear where the rest of that money’s going to come from. Especially when combined with promise of tax-cuts (for the rich), although a big chunk is presumably going to come from taking those who actually need benefits off benefits, so that those who are cunning and sly and do defraud the system can continue to do so*.
I fear for what remains of the NHS, since Labour have continued to screw about with it. Although I do think that the NHS should run an ad-campaign which is actually proud of what we’ve achieved. So many of us in the NHS are disheartened that we forget we have damn good outcomes for a cut-price health service, and while a lot needs work (I do quite often wander around work thinking “Doing the impossible with the insufficient” is our slogan) it’s a damn fine service in many ways, and we should stand up and slap the Daily Mailites for slagging it off. Hopefully I won’t be here to watch as the NHS finally gets privatised, because that would be heartbreaking for me. And watching the Conservatives screw it over, again, well that I don’t look forward to either.
And the final nail in the coffin for Britain, many Conservatives want to take us back out of Europe. Hey, people, this country has abandoned making anything… all we’ve got is a service economy… do you think that anyone’s going to want a service economy from us if we’re not part of Europe? At the moment we’re part of the largest single market in the world, do they think all our problems will mysteriously get better if we’re not part of Europe? Most of our problems, are, I suspect, due to the fact we piss about on the outskirts of being involved.
A large proportion of Conservatives surveyed, apparently, want us to have ‘free trade’ agreements (individually) with the countries of Europe and us to pull out of the Union. Do they really, truly believe that’s a good idea or are they still living in the 50s, when we actually had some real say in the way the world runs.
We, as a country, need to get over ourselves. We are no longer the great Empire builders, we are just another (small) European country which is dependent on those around us to survive. What we should be doing is getting properly involved in Europe, ditching our pointless border protection (I can travel around the rest of Europe without a passport or even seeing a border**, how come I need one to get in and out of the UK). If we did that and concentrated on dealing with getting rid of the tiny minority of immigrants who really have come in inappropriately, and also stopped being so bloody xenophobic, this could still be quite a nice country – filled with people who actually want to work (that’s the reason most immigrants come here, not for our arcane and complex benefits system). Instead we spend a lot of time looking inwards and complaining about immigration and saying how wonderful it would be if it was just us here.
Still, if the Conservatives do pull the UK out of Europe hopefully I’ll be in Canada and can stand watching and laughing. With luck, Scotland and Wales will fight more for their independence so they can rejoin, and then hilarity will commence.
Anyhow, I’m going to stop whining about the UK, have a bath, and possibly commence working on the shower. I was going to go to B&Q but it appears to be raining. A lot. Again.
* Since those who defraud the system are the ones best equipped to make it through the maze of hurdles required to obtain benefits, particularly as the system gets more complex.
** The only one we encountered was on the way into France, and it wasn’t staffed, it was an abandoned border crossing.
