Why Brexit is too much like Scylla and Charybdis

A couple of times recently I've been in casual group conversations when the Brexit thing has popped up. In the course of these chats I've mentioned the run-rate payment figure and everyone said I was way off the mark. I decided to recheck the numbers from ONS and found that my approximations were, indeed, almost exact.

The most current complete ONS Pink Book (2016) gives the following figures:

But actually, there's a few more credits from the EC back to the private sector, so the real numbers are slightly different and a bit lower than the figures I remembered.

But, goes the argument, even if I'm right, that's still an awful lot of money...

Well, yes, to a single individual, but not to a Government exchequer. My similar calculation for the amount of the annual UK run-rate is around 1%. Here's the pie chart, which I originally generated about 18 months ago on 9 March 2017.

We can see that the EU spending is one of the smallest items, albeit now consuming nearly all of the UK's available government bandwidth. To the point about it still being a big number, here's how it falls out:

About 40p per person per day. I have a sneaking suspicion that the new cost of being 'out' will be somewhat higher. So my thinking is that we've given the government, other politicians and even the opposition a chance to come up with a proper exit plan.

Everyone has failed, giving a choice between 'No Deal' (Crash out) and 'Chequers' - a cobbled together deal which even the Conservatives can't agree about.

It's even more galling to see some of those responsible for the mess now taking side-swipes at what is ultimately of their own doing.

It leaves Mrs May between a rock and a hard place. Choose a whirlpool or a multi headed monster.

Unfortunately, Mrs May doesn't have a Circe to advise on the choice.

Her advisors are about as foresightful as Epimetheus, shown here taking Pandora's gift. Will he open the box? Oops.

It makes my own Brexit decision preference appear loopy, but to me, still the best option. Even at this late stage, just abandon the whole thing.

I'll argue that we need to make the choice richer.

• No Deal (awful and this way lies the freefall madness of the whirlpool)
• Chequers deal (bad enough and already compromised. Meet the 6 headed monster)
• Rescind Article 50 and stay in. Like the same as now, but ideally with better representatives than the saboteurs we all elected

No one yet likes my last option. It's backtracking, against the will of the people, unconstitutional, could create civil unrest, too late.

But it's my preference and I think it should be given proper airtime alongside the awful options. We have just wasted two years not achieving anything. Let's not waste another four splashing through a whirlpool whilst having our industries and services picked off one-by-one by a multi-headed monster.

Cor Baby, that's really John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett in Topsham

An early evening Sunday roast in The Globe, then time to saunter to the local St Matthews Hall, where pop-star legends John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett were performing a gig.

Their gigs are designed to be experienced rather than reported, so I'll leave out some of the spoiler moments. Suffice to say the bouncing self-effacing pop-star persona of John Otway contrasts to the grounded owl-like professional musician image of Wild Willy Barrett.

A totally entertaining evening with an, at times, unhinged performance interspersed with stories and -er- unusual events.

They've had a couple of hits spaced around 25 years apart, so Otway will describe himself as a pop musician with a long career.

It's never that simple and along the way there were the band years paying several sets of wages, the split and re-union with Wild Willy Barrett, gigs ranging from pubs right the way to the Albert Hall, a failed world tour with an expensive jet plane, and the mysterious coach tour gigs to Dunkirk.

Otway's first book was called "Cor Baby that's really me" and taglined as "Rock-and-roll's greatest failure". He wears the badge proudly and still tells of moment as a nine-year old when the fortune teller explained about his golden bird of good fortune.

On-stage, there's a broad range of instruments, and the two musicians establish and easy and humorous rapport, between themselves and with the audience. The brown wheely bin is a sensational musical instrument in its own right, and I'd say it's the only one of those I've ever seen.

A whole evening best described as 'unforgettable'.

I decided to add some old footage of a few markers along the path, and urge anyone to see them whenever they are in their area.

First, their original Old Grey Whistle Test performance, including live mishap.

Then, a documentary during the 'punk meets Stones' band years.

And a lovely 2010 interview with Otway, which explains a few things

Come back soon.

Topsham field notes

A few months illustrating machinery on the field opposite. We start with some ploughing.

Then later, some harvesting of the results.

Add a recent spot of digging.

Maybe check for anything of archeological significance.

It's not that far to dig down to the Roman level. Isca Dumnoniorum and all that.

sun bubble

We've been in a sun bubble this week. It was similar last week although suspicious in terms of the various weather forecasts we all use.

As well as the inevitable BBC weather, I use Carrot, which I find generally accurate. However, between our varied group we had about six services, which all gave different results. Maybe an 8 degree Celsius spread and vastly different predictions for rainfall.

We gambled that the weather would be better than most predictions and sure enough our luck held. Morning on the water, with a few scenic clouds.

It's even more bizarre for this area, where we are close to the Met Centre, yet BBC now uses MeteoGroup, which was originally a German system, now spreading across Europe. Fortunately we had clear skies when a passing Spitfire decided to do a barrel roll in front of us.

It turns out that a well-known prince was making a visit to the area and a small display was provided for his enjoyment.

And then the clear skies continued into the evening.

Early evening we could see the moon from the quayside and later even identify stars and constellations from outside the pub

questa mattina mi sono alzato *

I noticed a new track featuring Tom Waits. It's on Marc Ribot's new album, 'Songs Of Resistance 1942 - 2018' and is a song and tune from the Italian resistance in the 1940s - Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful).

The Jem Cohen video uses more recent footage of protests.

* One fine morning I woke up early

Cold War - sewing a silken thread from dreams

I've just seen the movie Cold War, by Paweł Pawlikowski, which develops the passionate yet fractured love story of a pianist-composer and a folk-singer through the background of the Cold War in the 1950s.

Screened in 4:3 monochrome, every framing by cinematographer Łukasz Żal is sumptuous and could easily translate into first rate stills shots too. The soundtrack uses a mix of folk, classic, showy tunes, jazz and emergent rock-and-roll as a backdrop within the evolving story.

The photogenic Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) is attracted to one of his new auditions: the fringe-haired blonde teenager Zula (Joanna Kulig). Their story develops as Wiktor's (previous love?) producer Irena (Agata Kulesza) falls to the wayside. Together Wiktor's group of singers must portray a diplomacy-laden rethink of Polish folk tunes for elite theatre goers, increasingly across Europe.

We see the story move from Poland to Berlin, then to Paris and beyond. It's a haunting movie, packed with individual moments of bitter sweet clarity and deliberately directed with quite distinct gaps to be filled by the viewer.

It's all good, man.

I've been enjoying the latest series of Better Call Saul. I really enjoy Vince Gilligan's show-running and early in Breaking Bad, I even downloaded some scripts as examples of good screenplay.

There's a mastery in the techniques used in this current show, which is set in the time before Breaking Bad. The same desert, flip-open burner phones and people up to no good. Shred and burn.

A confident part of the story-telling is how Breaking Bad plot lines have taken until the fourth series to emerge. Even a music sting in Episode 5.

Now, as well as characters, we get, for example, to see how they built that improbable lab underneath the heavyweight machinery of that industrial laundry.

Then it starts be about who knows who? How were they introduced? What did they do to one another. Some of it will end in tears. Or worse. Much worse.

It's a lesson in unrevealed back-stories. Pleasing also that this show is being released weekly, although I have a feeling I'll binge watch it again once the whole of series 4 is out there.

rope a dope the electorate

Singular BoJo blusters to replace May's defective Chequers deal. The leaked Yellowhammer 'No deal' looks even worse.

Labour's internecine arguments further dissipate their vague position. LibDem and Green want a Peoples' Vote but risk dividing the electorate.

That's an electorate on the ropes whilst elite posture. Oh well, as Elon Musk might say, pass di dutchie.

yellowhammer and the clowns are both just distracting larks

Now that Yellowhammer has been snapped in the wild, it's time to separate the corn buntings from the chaffinches. Appropriately, the countryside slang name for Yellowhammer is sometimes the "scribble lark".

I'm drawn to think of those latest scribbled papers as part of a rough-and-ready plan. More a decoy lark than the real thing.

BoJo and Top Hat clown are getting ready to attempt to veto May's bodged Chequers plan, with a hurriedly put together alternative. Another countryside story about the yellowhammer is that its red tongue belongs to the devil.

It's obvious what the devilish are doing. To stop the May Chequers deal, they need an alternative other than No Deal.

So that's what the scary clowns did during their summer holidays. Got out their crayons and drew their own fanciful picture of a deal. Expect more of it to foam from a well-known newspaper at the weekend.

I've decided its about time to classify the scenarios in play, in terms of effort to achieve and attractiveness. They all come out pretty grim.

1. The David Davis deal: Civil servants under little leadership producing something which was ultimately found to be empty and useless. Kicked into touch by May herself.
2. May's replacement so-called Chequers deal. Ill-formed with huge gaps and being challenged by others from the same party. Put together by a few highly paid secret advisors to placate the 18 months of no progress.
3. BoJo and the clowns. A political bish-bosh hurriedly assembled and full of new wishful thinking which will prove a useless distraction.
4. No Deal. Designed to seem so unattractive that the Chequers deal wins. A cheap trick, but one that the public may well believe.
5. Remain. The best outcome, but not what the vote said. A groundswell to get this considered hasn't been achieved and the opposition are asleep at the wheel.
6. What we were promised. Allegedly the best, but all built on lies.

Yeah, Well. Here's today's FT summary, before all of the scenarios kick in.

fixing an epson printer with vodka

I'm not recommending this, but it did get me out of a jam. Some years ago I donated a broken Epson printer to the local tip. The device didn't print although everything else seemed to work.

The salutary point was that someone at the tip asked if they could have the plastic crate that the printer was in, but the actual printer ended up in a skip with the broken lawnmowers.

This time, away from rashbre central, I thought I'd try something different. I read that print heads can get clogged if the printer isn't used enough. Even the cleaning cycle won't fix it. There's various kits with syringes and special paper to fix it for about £15. I didn't have time for this, because I needed something printed "Right Now".

Time for the J-Cloth and vodka.

I started the printer cleaning cycle and then powered the whole printer off when the big print head was in the middle. It can be pushed by hand at that point. I cut some J-Cloth into a strip, folded it double and put it under the print head (ie where the paper would normally sit).

Then another piece of J-Cloth onto which I dabbed a small amount of vodka. Transfer the vodka to the J-cloth strip in the printer, move the head backwards and forwards. Like I was 'ironing' the J-Cloth with the print head. Lots of colourful smudges transferred to the J-cloth. Alcohol was breaking down the blocked ink.

Remove everything, reset the printer, run the printer cleaning cycle once and then...

Hooray. It all worked like new again.

Cheers.

prioritising prior pieces at the prior priory

As well as reading a book for discussion, I've also joined another creative writing group. I used to belong to one which met every couple of weeks to review a small piece of a text and to write something short triggered from it. We'd all review one another's creations, in a positive way.

That group folded, but the new one I've joined seems like a good alternative. So far we've had an on-the-spot writing session and separately a session to review excerpts from each others' writing. It's also a great way to see some interesting pieces of the local scene.

This time we met in the beamed roof of an ex-refectory from a Benedictine priory. It was originally established at the behest of William the Conqueror around 1070 and had rebuilds during the 450 years the monks occupied it. Then in 1536, King Henry VIII brought about dissolution of priories and the old monastic church and cloisters were pulled down. The imposing hall remained and around 1650, the original tall refectory space was divided to make three floors of chambers.

We were now on the top floor for our review session. Most folk had written something new, highly varied and all well-written. I decided to take a piece from one of my unfinished NaNoWriMo sessions, which I'd produced around three years ago. It wasn't so much laziness as just not knowing what to expect until I'd been to one of these sessions.

We all received suggestions for changes and improvements, and I found the whole process most interesting. Not only feedback on my own work, but also the ideas applied to the writing of others. It's re-fired my enthusiasm for further writing as well as a chance to review and tidy some of my prior efforts.

But here's the thing. The tuning efforts seem to take much longer than the original writing. At least the writing conducted as part of the NaNoWriMo thing. That's when I have attempted to write 1,666 words per day/50,000 words total in the month of November. The doctrine of NaNoWriMo is to keep going. Can't think of anything to write? Add some weather/scenery/throw in a McGuffin.

For the revisions it's very different. And that's the piece I'm working through at the moment.

bugs from outer space

The next book to discuss in our pub-based book club is an oldie. The Andromeda Strain by Micheal Crichton, the writer of Jurassic Park. Now I hadn't read any Crichton for years and recollect thinking that his novels were somehow similar to one another. I mainly remember them as something I'd be reading standing on rush hour Central Line. Not too taxing and easy to restart. His other books include Congo - monsters in the jungle. Jurassic Park - monsters on an island. Prey - mini monsters in the desert.

But that's a but unfair. After our last pub group book (Dave, by Will Self), this one was a much easier page turner.

The Andromeda Strain is one of Crichton's earliest works about a nasty bug that comes back inside a space capsule. Although the plot is mini monsters in the desert, there's some interesting bits of science included, particularly considering the book dates from about 1969.

The book is not available on Kindle, and doesn't seem to be in publication anywhere. I managed to get an American copy via eBay, but I'm wondering if there's about to be a bumper anthology version issued for Christmas, or something?

It's quite interesting to see an author developing his style in this type of book. He has the various players make a variety of mistakes, but to help the reader, they are all quite heavily signposted as the story runs along. Kind of "Don't take the mysterious capsule back into town...Don't try to open it...Don't forget to wire up the security buttons in all of the secret underground rooms" and so on.

I enjoyed it as a read for our upcoming discussion, and my copy of the book is interesting of itself. Its pages are cut right to the very edge of the text and in my copy there were a couple of squished items.

I couldn't help thinking that maybe the andromeda strain was lurking in these old library books, waiting to be released.