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There is not a lot to say right now but I feel that a new posting is due. Weather-wise, spring is struggling to get the better of winter and has been succeeding during the day with temperatures in the low 20s from midday through to late afternoon, although the evenings are still very cold. I've tried once again to capture on photo the blue of the sky in mid-afternoon, a deep violet without a cloud n the sky. It's a blue I have never seen in the sky anywhere else. The result is below.

Because of the weather I'm once again playing boules regularly but also beginning a mental list of the jobs around the house that need doing. In the garden I've cut down the clematises (is that the plural of clematis?) but not done much else. I think I may have won my battle with the Mairie to get the lime trees in front of my house pruned, if only because on my last visit to the MairieI said that some of the lower branches of one of the trees could hit a truck if a large one happened to come by (they rarely do). Anyway, hiring some contractor to do the work is apparently on the agenda. There's a lot of preparatory work to be done for the spring but it is still slightly early to do most of it other than clearing winter debris. In the autumn I planted another 50-60 bulbs in various places out front and they are coming through but have yet to bloom. If the trees get pruned I'll pobably add another hanging basket in the front.

In the house there is essentially little that has to be done, other than a little clearing up and freshening things up, but both my son and my daughter and family have sad they want to come, as have some friends. I'm not house-proud (far from it some might say), but there are several small jobs that would no doubt add to the pleasure of any visitors. I'll get at least some of them done.

Nothing much else is on the agenda until May, when I shall go with the village team to the regional boules championships on the coast in the Var. Then follows the merry-go-round of village festivities in June and July, the pizza and moules-frites evenings in front of the Bar du Pont, etc. It's a lot to look forward to.

Brexit And Politics

As ever, I'm still puzzling over Brexit and politics in the UK. If and when I get French nationality this will all be academic to me but I think that I will never entirely lose my UK roots. It seems to me that when the Leave campaign made an appeal to nationalism half of the UK population mislaid its brains. I had never realised how powerful that appeal could still be. I've always cheered on the England football team, if only half-heartedly at times, and wanted it to whop the foreigners, but that is as far as it went. I had thought that with so many Brits taking holidays abroad they must have appreciated some things in other cultures. As one commenter put it years ago, the Brits had been Romans but had become Italians. In fact, it seems, they simply took Rome (Britain) with them and transferred it temporarily to sunnier climes. I can understand why those seriously deprived, a large number in Britain today, might find the idea of radical change appealing, and why the message of hope would be powerful. What I still fail to comprehend is the lack of forethought and intelligence and the apparent complacency and fatalism when the dream sold to Leavers has become so obviously a lie. If I had been one of them I think I would not still be clinging to the impossible dream but howling for the blood of those liars, cheats and fraudsters who had sold me it

The crux of the political problem in the UK seems to me that around half of the population is essentially unrepresented. For the moment, the Conservative party is irrevocably split and I can't see anything that would genuinely unite it. A similar split is becoming ever more apparent in the Labour party. The Conservative party seems determined to deliver Brexit, no matter how. The Labour party seems determined to force a general election which it's leader thinks he will win, although current polls and events throw considerable doubt on this. If there is to be an early general election, I would hope for a hung Parliament, which would marginalise extremes in both parties. Anything Parliament could then do would probably be not much but would rely on consensus, which is nowhere around at the moment when dogmas hold sway. In short, Britain’s future is at stake but neither of the main political parties seems interested in that, only in their own internal squabbles.

The breakaway of Labour MPs was perhaps inevitable at some point. They can have no hope of power and have put their country before their party, among the first politicians to do so. If they form a party it will have a short life, as all breakaway parties do, just waiting for the main parties to come to their senses. While there is little prospect of that happening the breakaway MPs may yet serve a useful purpose for the country.

What I find most dispiriting is that blatant lies, fraud and dubious ,at best, arrangements (agreements, honours, contracts) based openly on bribes and financial self-interests go virtually unchallenged and seem to be accepted as the norm. I cannot accept that and, were I still in the UK, would be tearing my hair out and howling, if no one would listen than at the moon. A great deal has inevitably changed during my lifetime but I have never known a time before when lies so consistently were not exposed, when fraud was not penalised and when cheating was assumed to be the norm. Why does an apparently large proportion of the British population now apparently accept this and not fight against it? That is what I cannot understand.