24th Oct – It’s not today que le ciel me tombera sur la tête.

Cleaned myself: somehow not
Monkey see, monkey do: 0
Tics: tic off.
Believe in God? More tomorrow
YTLH: some toothache, and a loose bowel, otherwise fine.

Forgive me, but I seldom get to see the television these days. I caught a bit of the News the other night: Rylan Clark-Neal was sending in a satellite report from the front line at Nagorno-Karabakh to Stacey Dooley anchoring in the studio. Now, I know that my enemy’s enemy is my friend an all that, but, due respect to Rylan notwithstanding, the standard tropes of Foreign Correspondent reporting, only explain a part of it.

Just to be clear, Azerbaijan and Armenia are fighting over a disputed piece of land that lies between them, N-K, but when Turkey, Armenia’s neighbour, decided to get involved, what side did they choose? That’s right, Azerbaijan – not because of all that my enemy’s enemy stuff, no, they did it because neighbours get on your nerves. Azerbaijan and Armenia (neighbours) were fighting, Turkey joins in and goes to Armenia, ‘hey leave my mate Azerbaijan alone.’ They might previously have had very little to fall out about, but as soon as the time came, all the little things that had bothered them over the years made the decision as to loyalty an easy one to make.

Obviously, my position vis a vis the parents and Mrs. Lindsay, is more your Nagorno-Karabakh – they both claim to have my best interests at heart, whilst leaving the area battle scarred and seemingly beyond recovery; they themselves having lived under an uneasy détente since that time Mrs Lindsay’s unpruned pear tree caused a wasp problem on the parent’s side of the fence – ‘what she doesn’t seem able to accept is that there could have been hornets (Indian).’

But looking to the bigger picture, we seem in this country to be determined to see everything as an adversarial dispute to be resolved. I mean, what if Turkey is not a straightforward backer of Armenia? – that our misconception is based on Rylan’s desire for an easy precis, and to get packed up and back to the spa for a beetroot sandwich?

If say we also had Gok Wan on the ground in Turkey, and Coleen Rooney in Armenia, all linking back to Stacey, we may well see a different story – but you know we don’t do it like that do we? If the BBC were to upgrade the coverage, you know what they’d do: they’d send Gok to one side, leave Rylan on the other, and report it like a tennis match, like they always do. It’s something to do with the fact that all the people that have ever been in charge of anything in the UK have always been ex-boarding school pupils, and they cannot conceive of communal solutions, because they haven’t had enough time at home to learn how to do it.

Can you imagine a country that didn’t have two sets of MPs arguing each claiming that the other didn’t understand how to manage the coronavirus/Brexit? Think for a moment, that instead of automatically filing into two sides, that for the big issues we always came together as a coalition of national unity to solve the problem? Like we did in the war, when one of them came up with the idea of making a telephone call to ask America to join in on our side? You never know, someone might do that this time and one of them gives South Korea a ring?

It’s virtually impossible to conceive of that approach when you live in the UK isn’t it? Our parliament is adversarial, as is the legal system, as is journalism. We are mad, aren’t we? We would rather have a row than be right.

I was thinking about these things when I went to pick up Big Tooth from Roger’s last night, and it explains, I think, why I took it all so well. So much so, that when I replied to the news of my sacking, I said, ‘that I could still be counted on to play a full and positive role in the Christmas pageant.’ Oh yes, and to seal the deal, ‘that it in no way diminished my commitment to my relationship with his daughter,’ who was watching as I said it.

In my defence, even though the overriding influence on my mind was the desire to find a positive, solutions-driven approach to what could have been a classically adversarial situation, my instincts were blurred by other considerations. I knew the sacking was coming, and I wanted to negotiate it by keeping the potentially CV enhancing pageant alive. And further, I needed to keep him to the budget by keeping his daughter, my ridiculous girlfriend, close to the production. So … but nevertheless, what a twat I am at times – I seem only to be capable of thinking about one thing at once.

Anny hoo, the simple-minded dolt, soon regretted his haste when he heard me say that I’ve offered a part in the pageant to Gok Wan – then just as he came to terms with that, Julia Louis Dreyfuss too. That sorted the hasty cove out a bit.

I guess that’s why so many things are hostile – that when forced to confront awkward news, most people resort to lying, and thus draw their opposers into a dispute. I’m too clever for that though; my lies are too big for ordinary peasants to come to terms with, and so they are forced to join back in on my side.

And, by the way, a disclaimer, I don’t even know Dominic Cummings, or Cambridge Analytica – I just made it all up on my own. They’re not that clever you know.