Rant

It’s difficult to describe the last week really. Since last Friday morning the atmosphere has changed in this country for obvious reasons; I have the feeling that I don’t live in a proper country anymore, but a composite of Trumpton, Chigley and Camberwick Green. This is just the beginning too, as this referendum saw bullshit on an unparalleled scale with zero accountability. I’ve obviously been immersed in the football for the last few weeks as well, with England’s sorry, but entirely predictable demise mirroring the country’s current political debacle.  An insular nation producing an insular team which is culturally redundant and places style over substance. There are no proper candidates to follow the owl  . . . How much was he paid? £3.8m a year, or something like that. He should have been sacked after the last World Cup, but this nation savours failure as long as it preserves the status quo. What’s ironic is that the referendum failed in that it didn’t preserve it. It exists for a reason, to make humanity a better, more caring adventure and to have a set of common rules and regulations that everyone has to adhere to, no matter what. The contempt that the Leave campaign has for these standards is, I think, borne out of an envy that they didn’t think of it first. I keep on thinking back to the 1970s and American petty jealousy   of Concorde. Also of Baseball, Basketball and American Football. World Champions on their own soil. It’s slowly going that way here, but as far as football is concerned, England have so under-achieved that they’d be hard-pushed to win a tournament consisting of Gibralter, The Faroes and themselves. It’ll be island championships in the future, but not including Iceland. The old chap who lives next door summed it up: voted Leave for no other reason than he had been scared into doing so by the Daily Mail, and when he spoke to my wife the next day (she’s French), thought he was being conciliatory when he pointed out that “the French are congratulating us”, until she pointed out that it was the Front National doing this, not any credible government. We were at a barbecue the weekend before at a friend’s. There was another couple there who we didn’t know. Once the bloke found out my wife’s nationality he couldn’t stop talking about how great France is, how they are over there all the time, what was his French like? Etc; we were leaving at 5 to meet my eldest son but just before we had started to get our skates on he brought up the referendum. “Oh I’m voting Leave because I hate Brussels and its bureaucracy”,  and off he went. I was thankful for the excuse to leave. The only reason for Brexit is to empower the right wing generally in this country and to further dilute worker’s rights. The only silver lining for me personally, on the other hand, was that I had a satisfactory insurance payout on my records, although I still can’t play any of them because our flood-damaged house is still recuperating and shit is everywhere. The summer has been crap so far and shows no signs of recovery, so here’s a chart. The first for a while.

Stuff I Like In Spite Of The Shite Going On At The Moment:

Acido 22 – Convextion (Acido)

NS012 – Levon Vincent (Novel Sound)

Scenes – Studio OST (Lustwerk Music)

Structures & Rhythms 94-99 – DJ Guy (Organic Analogue)

Interstellar – Jeremiah R (Instruction)

Conjure – DJ Qu (Strength Music)

Previsto – Leonardo Martelli (Antinote)

I See What You Did There – 214 (Shipwreck)

No Sleep Not In America – Savile (Stripped & Chewed)

DJ Safety – Suzanne Kraft (Kitjen)