may'd and confused

As I wandered past Downing Street today it looked pretty normal, with a gaggle of tourists sprawled around the pavement and other tourists walking past, oblivious to the Prime Minister's residence.

Look carefully through the railings and the cluster of media outside number 10 is more obvious. It's been a long time since the public could walk along this particular street, and security is tight as various pre-authorised cars and vans are searched on their way into the street.

The barriers have also been in place for a long time inside the main Parliament buildings complex, although the set shown are quite close to where the knifed attacker recently struck.

There's other barriers that have sprung up in new areas. Since the London Olympics took place, a new set of ornate barriers were placed along Whitehall, but now there's more of those yellow checkpoint type barriers and the black chicanes that only allow one person through at a time.

Some of their current use is linked to rehearsals of the upcoming pageantry in Central London.

The media village on St Stephen's Green gets built and rebuilt day by day. Remarkably, I find it is almost harder to keep up with what is happening when actually on the streets around Westminster.

Today's rumours were that the Queen's Speech was postponed. Then it wasn't and then it was again. Then a similar set of rumours about the start date for Brexit discussions. And behind it all were the robotic sound bites about "Lots of work to do".

I'm used to the phrase "flying in formation" when everyone has to stick to the same message. I wonder if it being interpreted as 'flying information' by the new presumptive minority government?

Ah, and later, when I finally saw a TV screen, I could see that even the BBC was dazed and confused, putting out two contrary ticker messages at the same time.

robots, zombies, denial, bribes, fences, tripe and sputter

That election thing has become the equivalent of a one-last-try CTL-ALT-DEL sequence but somehow hasn't unjammed anything. Now we have memory leakage, logjams and protection exceptions as we head towards a UK Blue Screen of Death.

Hard to imagine what yet another major reset could comprise? The leader's batteries are drained, further accentuating her lack of emotional intelligence. I'm pretty sure she'd have ejected if it hadn't been the only option for her party to leave her in position.

A few of her spokespeople are talking, providing fenced-off statements that corral the current situation. Not too much about what happened, some blame inferences, a few standard sound bites and not too much about what next. Nothing about the size of payment to the DUP to get their support. Nothing about the irony of negotiating internally instead of with the EU. Nothing about the big guns lining up for takeover. News managed.

Contrastingly, the losing party are dipping into detail on all questions and postulating direction.

Those that say Brits are good at irony are right for this situation.

What next? A Royal Reset? Grounds that the prevailing party forgot to put national interest first?

just hangin'

I hadn't planned to watch the election outcome, expecting a kind of inevitability.

Then the exit poll appeared and it looked as if everything was about to go sideways. Time to break open the chocolate chip cookies and milk.

Now we have a classic 'Ready, Fire, Aim' situation from Brexit and a shonky mayday attempt to salvage a government, probably with the DUP. All the while alternative Tory power monkeys are plotting her replacement.

In another change of direction, May won't follow what she said in her tweet a couple of weeks ago.

At the moment no-one knows what is going to happen next so the telly channels are all running either the Kensington and Chelsea recounts or myriad talking heads saying there will be a period of uncertainty.

So not stable and not strong then?

Teresa May is still hiding in Downing Street although is being told by her party to go to see the Queen at 12:30. I can't imagine Her Majesty being very amused by this turn of events.

Maybe it is time to revoke the Article 50 trigger to get some breathing space?

under the blue water of a hard rain

The picture above shows the 'before' state of the constituencies for the General Election. Yes, there is some red, mainly bundled around a few major cities. The rest, south of the Scottish border, is largely blue.

May called for the election allegedly to strengthen her mandate for the Brexit talks. Yes, right, nothing to do with the expectation that she could wrong foot every other party and grab a much larger majority. Nothing to do with the reversal over 'no election before 2020' pledge.

That the electorate then get treated with disdain, listening to few soundbites repeated endlessy, by a mainly robotic leader. That debates are eschewed in favour of set-piece pseudo speeches. That the largely empty manifesto doesn't provide costings and appears to be so easily adapted whenever it draws heat.

I feel there is little to commend the Maybot's performance, even with the low bar set by the other parties. I watched the rousingly good Corbyn speech from Gateshead, which drew a crowd of some 5000 to the area around the Sage. His words were well-received but largely unreported by the media.

May's scenes 'out and about' were supposedly also mixing with the electorate, but came across as wooden and protected from real debate by a doughnut of core supporters. She even had someone to knock on the doors for her. Stage managed for the media optics, although even that could be considered to have backfired.

When May stepped in to dig out the Cameron/Osborne mess, I was prepared to give her approach a chance.

Instead of providing plans, operational constructs and pragmatic actions, we are entering another period of reflexive actions, bereft of clearly articulated approaches beyond further hard times for the many.

outfoxed

Over the last few weeks I've driven pretty much the length and breadth of England, from at least Newcastle upon Tyne to Exeter, as well as across London a few times, diagonally across Wales from Hay to Merthyr Tydfil and out into Essex.

Whilst not comprehensive coverage, there's been notable aspect of the political campaign evoked by the roadside posters. They are nearly all for Conservatives, nearly all the same style and usually applied in clumps around road junctions.

By comparison, there's a few Lib Dem, an occasional Green and even a few Independent/specialist parties.

What I'm not seeing in any quantity are Labour placards. Often, when I think I've seen one, it turns out to be an estate agent board or something else.

Okay, and a few of those rogue posters on bus stops and tube trains which are hard-hitting hacked anti-Tory facsimiles. Subvertising, I think they call it.


I've looked at the betting too, which is showing odds around 1/10 for a Conservative victory and 9/2 for it to be over 400 seats. Conversely, I'd get 6/1 for a Labour win or 1000/1 for any other party.

So it seems to be in the bag. Many people don't pay that much attention to the details, so the broad brush waffle that is being used to win the campaign probably suffices. Or a shiny bead topic thrown in to help the undecided have a reason to vote.

There's plenty of proper questions that remain unanswered like: where's the money coming from? how much will tax rise? how much would we need to pay the EU ongoing? what else will be privatised? which segments will be turned over to get more money? where will further cuts occur? and so on.

Annoyingly, the general response from May and her gang is vague using oft-repeated track selections. For any topic it's about selecting the right tune from a playlist. Spotification of Politics. Spolitics? Or, if there's a really contentious point, run fog and haze across it to occlude the issue.

I'm not convinced that May really has any proper backup for what she is saying. Maybe there's strategic backup for a) winning b)changing the electoral boundaries and so on, but for the operational needs I'm finding her words increasingly hypocritical.

Like many, I gave May the benefit of the doubt once in position, after the disastrous Cameron/Osborne combo crashed the UK into wall, aided and abetted by Gove and BoJo.

May was dealt a rubbish hand to start with, but doesn't seem to have progressed with any proper operating detail since that time. Even the "Brexit means Brexit", yet "Good deal or no deal" are oxymoronic.

And can I trust her words? Sadly No, based on recent track record - at least partly by the way she is being fed policy by bunglers. And I suspect this point is not lost on the EU negotiators.

They say we get the politicians and results we deserve. I wonder whether that is really true, when much of the debate is skewed and cynically kept lightweight.

steel and determination

Another atrocity in London, just a few bridges along from the Westminster Bridge one a few weeks ago.

A similar cowardly attack on innocents in a bustling area. Both Westminster and Borough Market are popular spots, both for tourists and Londoners alike.

My chance picture above and below are from a week or so ago when I walked past the very pub that has featured in the latest grim events.

Yesterday evening I watched the Manchester remembrance concert, wrapped in its spirit of defiance. London has the same ability to carry on, with its memories of prior incidents and campaigns.

I drove through the London City ring of steel a few days ago and remarked that it was no longer used, but still had all of its apparatus in place.

Like the removal again of rubbish bins from termini and the pervasive addition of new street bollards, we'll expect to see other changes to the streets until ways have been found to round up the current evil cowards.

Hay nonny

We managed to dip into some items at the Hay Festival. One was a discussion, ahead of broadcast, of a new examination of Utopia(s).

Years ago, I read Thomas More's original book, whose remarks create a response to Plato's Republic. I was left with an overwhelming impression of an authoritarian state, where free will had been replaced with a range of managed distractions.

I suppose I regarded the book as a kind of early science fiction, where a new world had been built, largely as a mechanism to critique the prevailing one.

The upcoming BBC Four show didn't seem to emphasise More quite so strongly, and reviewed wide ranging attempts at Utopias and model societies, both utopian and dystopian.

There were references to The Hunger Games and the recently televised Handmaid's Tale. A couple of sections dealt firstly with a Latvian(?) simulation of a hard-line authoritarian role playing drama and secondly with a fifty year extant community living with Utopian ideals in Twin Oaks, Virginia.

Suffice to say that the Latvian example was all rottweilers and fierce spirit-breaking interrogations and the Twin Oaks was all about collectivism with plenty of rules.

My aerial photo of the Twin Oaks would, for example, break their 'no use of drones' rule. Apparently the drones are not to be trusted.

There didn't seem to real answers to the thoughts about which models worked the best. All had their inevitable flip-side, although, when pressed, one of there presenters ventured a long view that right now was maybe about as good as it gets.

country by itself

I'm using a Wolfgang Tillman picture for today's post as well as yesterday's.

The original Tillman poster reference was to the Brexit vote, but it seems to apply just as well to the latest action of the US, who now seem hell-bent to reinvigorate their industry by breaking all of the pollution and environmental accords.

I can't help wonder how much the keyword 'Paris' also features in Trump's decision. The US President was trumped by French President Emmanuel Macron on their handshakes and then given the swerve in a subsequent NATO meeting. It suggests that a vindictive narcissistic bullying type of person might want to find a way to wreak a revenge against the person that was able to upstage him.

Interestingly, Macron has already issued a video statement in English urging US scientists to relocate to France, after Trump's withdrawal from the UN Paris climate accord.

There's new troubles ahead too, with our own premier distancing herself from the opprobrium and not joining in with the words of censure directed towards Trump.

Meanwhile, USA's TV channels are showing the effects in Miami and other parts of the US from the already increasing height of water created from the melting of the polar ice-caps.

Some calculations are that it would take another ten years before Mar-a-lago becomes submerged as a full Lago.

Unless a July 4th impeachment goes ahead, over that decade it may be difficult to recognise some parts of the world as we currently know them, with the UK's fracture, a different multi-tiered version of Europa and US sliding from superpower to sapped power.

Tillmans at the Tate

I popped into take a look at the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at the Tate Modern. Perhaps that was my mistake. To pop in.

It's because the vast exhibition covers much of the printed materials from Tillmans. Usually an exhibition is curated with handy signage on the walls to assist understand the theming or the context of particular sections. For this exhibition, such niceties had been removed, with the main exhibits being self-curated by the artist.

To be honest, I found this quite a tall order for a viewer. There's nothing to say that art has to be easy to understand, but I've been to plenty of other large exhibitions and been able to deduce the main themes, ideas or points as I walked through the rooms.

Here it sees to be all about the viewer needing to make the connections. Through quite a lot of static. Quite literally, with a whole wall dedicated to the white noise from the end of a digital broadcast (Sendeschluss/End of Broadcast V). Or an oft-reproduced picture of a fly picking over the remains of lobster. Maybe a metaphor for a gallery visitor?

Some aspects of this show reminded me of my recent garage cleansing. I'd sometimes take a pile of papers or whatnots and spread them out on a carpet in order to decide if there was anything of value to keep.

It could be that Tillmans adopted a similar approach. Find a drawer of related material and spread it out over a wall or some paste tables?

That's not to say there weren't some interesting items around the displays. I liked the idea of the Truth Study Centre section, which examined the psychology of manipulation and included some recent examples.

My picture shows it from another exhibition, which somehow looks more structured than the browser screen print version on display at the Tate.

Not exhibited, Tillman also produced a series of anti-Brexit posters, which did provide more of a focus within his work, and some good finished product, although even in that series there were some rather less finished items.

However, because the exhibit took a whole room and many of the pieces were google page snaps from learned articles, it became difficult to process. More like someone was researching for a book and had decided to spread out all of their Evernote clippings as printed pages.

Some of the photographs were interesting and extremely wide-ranging. Tillmans has clearly travelled extensively and we were treated to many aspects of his world view. However, I couldn't help thinking that some would make good paperback covers, rather than that they were exquisite fine art.

It made the show a challenge for me. Perhaps that was the intention? The materials were very diverse but, to me, somehow scrappy. Just printing it large doesn't make it brilliant, nor does fire-hosing the ideas at an audience. The picture above shows one of the more grounded juxtapositions, this one between a spacey modern car headlight's angular aggression and a peaceful blue night scape.

I decided to move along, alas, somehow less moved than I should have been.

along the border

Further west for a few days, in the land of border castles, this time between England and Wales.

Aside from the castles, there's the examples of the battle-side camps used by knights. The example in my picture shows one with a comfortable four poster bed, and a separate sitting room.

I believe the medieval scheme was one of primogeniture, where the firstborn inherited the main land, the second born would go to the clergy and the third and so on would become knights. The knights could power up their status via judicious capture of opponents.

It was in the days before the armies fighting became fully systematised, and there was much money to be made from the return of valuable pieces (knights) to their estate, for the suitable payment of a ransom.

Also there was an idea where the code of chivalry would allow the return of a captured asset with a time allowance for the repayment of the ransom, to give the knight's estate time to raise the money.

A well known example was the capture of the French King John II, by the English, during the Hundred Years War. All manner of hostage swaps and financial arrangements were mads, although France didn't really have the funds.

air con

The improvised air conditioning worked surprisingly well. A freezer tray, ice cubes and a fan. Must remember to put everything back together before moving on.

the difference of a day

After my comments about limited discernible difference in security, a day later the same scene now has a notable addition.

Look carefully to the right edge of the station entrance, spot the yellow high visibility jackets.

As well as police augmenting security staff, there's a now a couple of mounted police supporting the normal security.