Now this I can agree with: http://worklessparty.org/ The article might be a fraction long for a busy LLFF reader, but the idea that we are too efficient for our own goods rings very true with me, and is firmly in line with one of my other obsessions, the paradox of choice. I was listening to Oliver James on the radio the other day, the author of Affluenza (which I haven't read), who was talking about all parents rushing off to make more money to support their children and god knows I don't have a clue about all this being single and childless, but he was suggesting offering serious cash incentives to parents to stay at home while their children were young, paying them around £25k a year not to go back to work but instead to be full-time parents, at least for the first three years, and it does make sense in a crazy way. All this money, all these desires, it's not right. I didn't agree with John Major about much, but conceptually, Back to Basics is surely where it's at.
But now, Back to Me. I feel like I've been flying by the seat of my pants a bit recently, rushing around trying to have fun and get everything done before I hit the beach on Saturday. The weather has just been glorious, which has added to the confusion since I am now unable to exercise during daylight hours as it would mean wasting possible tanning windows. In an attempt to pre-empt the beached whale whiteness on Beach Day 1, I have slathered myself in Clarins fake tan, which has come up trumps everywhere except the area between my fourth and little toe on my left foot, which is the colour of Dale Winton.
I didn't talk nearly enough (for my liking) about my politics course last Thursday. Now it's all rather distant and less emotive, but I feel I must share that we were joined by two journalists - one, representing the liberal left, from The Guardian, and one from the right-wing Spectator - and although it was all gripping, my favourite bit was probably the feeling that us outsiders doing the politics course were all a bunch of cynics and that the two people who worked 'in the business', who I would have expected to be far more cynical than the rest of us put together, both genuinely believed in politics as a force, and both seemed frustrated that we and the population at large are so delighted every time things go wrong, and so convinced that it's all a great mess. One of them said it was a bit like the scene in The Life of Brian where they say, "All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" [copied and pasted from a Gearch search, not transcribed from memory] - the idea being that we all sit around slagging off politics and the failing system, and it's so easy to forget all the amazing things that have changed in the course of the last few decades, in the course of half a lifetime - gay marriage legalized, double the funding on the NHS etc. Of course not all changes are unarguably for the better but the fact is, things, massive things, do change. And they will in the future too. It was heartening and inspiring. My second bit was when the Guardian journalist, who I slightly loved, said I should become an MP and that she'd vote for me. I answered, as I always do when people tell me I should become an MP (which happens more often than I would expect) that I am far too lazy and don't want to work that hard. But it was still nice that she liked me.
I wonder if, if I ever have a massive change of heart and decide to stand as an MP, having written the sentence above will come back to haunt me? Although, that said, if I do become an MP, I don't think that admitting that I'm lazy and don't want to work very hard is the most embarrassing/career-destroying thing I've written on this blog. A short click away in the Jane = idiot section, I'm sure any dirt-hunters would find a lot better material. Ah well. Maybe I'll change my name before going into politics. Wouldn't want to meet a world leader and find that they knew that I'd once fallen drunk off a bus after my 10k run and that my ankle is permanently swollen, or that I'd temporarily blinded myself by accidentally putting deodorant in my eye or that I once set fire to my mum's pashmina at a wedding reception while talking to one of the judges of Britain's Next Top Model. Better to keep this identity a secret, eh?
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