April Reading List

 Somewhat late for the deadline this month, but really, who's counting? 

The Dark is Rising series - Susan Cooper

Technically five books, Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark Is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King and Silver on the Tree. More books that I haven't read for a long time, although despite being children's books I don't think I read them as a child. I think perhaps my mid-twenties? And, as with so many of the other books I'm re-visiting I remembered almost nothing from them. One character had stuck in my mind, but only one. And one location. Nice to be absorbed in a good fantasy with just enough peril but not too much.

Espedair Street - Iain Banks

Mostly I'd remembered enjoying the non-sci-fi Iain Banks books and yet found this one surprisingly joyless. I didn't really like any of the characters, I wasn't particularly interested in what became of them, and it all left me feeling rather flat. I had been planning to re-read some more Iain Banks, but now I'm not sure. Perhaps this will be an opportunity to purge the shelves of something I don't really enjoy? Or perhaps it depends upon my mood and I should give another one a go some other time.

An Aside...

Why, you might ask, would I think my mood is having such an impact on my reading? Well, since the schools re-opened and LittleBear finished with home-learning and went back to the classroom, his sleep patterns have gone out of the window. He struggles to get to sleep. He struggles to stay asleep. The only source of comfort and reassurance is Mummy-cuddles. And heart-warming though it is that my presence is enough to lull my poppet to sleep, I do not function well on broken sleep. 

Most nights LittleBear now spends in a bed with me, because I simply stopped being able to operate as a vaguely normal human being when spending an hour or more every night trying to reassure him enough to go back to sleep in his own bed. And now, sleeping with Mummy is a habit that he is either unwilling or unable to break. Meanwhile I feel broken. It currently feels as though parenthood is a choice between my child's well-being and my own, with no path that allows for both. Naturally this isn't actually true, as it's only my own psyche that is telling me that the world judges me for my nine-year-old son needing me with him to sleep. But my own psyche is a harsh mistress, and spends a lot of her time telling me I'm a failure, a bad mother, incompetent and a whole host of other negative things. The kind of things I would never dream of thinking, let alone saying, about a friend, but with which I allow my psyche to berate me.

So, with my own mental health seemingly spiralling deeper into the mire of self-flagellation, I am finding that it is only by reading lightweight fluff, or looking at pictures of cats on the internet that I am able to find a semblance of inner calm. I don't need angst, or betrayal, rage or recriminations. I need comfort. Which leads me on to the next wave of books that I am compulsively consuming...

Artemis Fowl; Artemis Fowl and the Arctic Incident; Artemis Fowl and the Eternity Code - Eoin Colfer

I treated myself to the entire set of Artemis Fowl books, having read the first 4 when they were published. They're fun, silly, entertaining, and just what my battered psyche needs. The peril is not too perilous, there are fart jokes and fairies. What more could I ask for?

Political rage

Every time I think I have run out of ways to be angry about politics... the contemptible shit-weasels who govern us find new ways to rile me. I would say they find new ways to surprise me, but the one thing their corrupt manoeuverings don't do any more, is surprise me.

We've just had, as some of you will have noticed, a raft of local elections of various descriptions. Despite my feeling that asking us to vote for Police and Crime Commissioners is utterly stupid, given how much any of us know about how to run a police force, I was heartened that we had a half-way-to-grown-up voting system for them and for our mayors. We were allowed to use a supplementary vote system, which avoids the need to try and make tactical decisions about how to vote. Second preference voting in the mayoral election in my area meant that instead of the Tory candidate getting in with 40% of the vote, the 60% who'd voted for a left-of-centre candidate were rewarded with a left-of-centre mayor. Not exactly Proportional Representation, but a massive step forward from First Past The Post, which punishes parties who are at the same end of the political spectrum by splitting their vote (see previously Tories and the Brexit Party but currently affecting left-of-centre votes for Labour, Liberal Democrat and Green).

Can you guess what the Tory Party's reaction to Labour winning 11 out of 13 mayoral contests is? That's right, they intend to revert mayoral elections to being First Past The Post, an antiquated, unrepresentative system that we should, if we were a mature, intelligent democracy, be moving away from. I am sickened by the naked thirst for power exhibited here - "we didn't win, so we're going to rig the electoral system in our favour". And with a massive Parliamentary majority, they'll do just that. All the howls of outrage from advocates for democracy will be meaningless. All the letters to MPs begging for integrity will be irrelevant. All the eloquent speeches from the Opposition benches will change nothing. FPTP won the Tories 56% of the seat on 44% of the vote, allowing them to now do exactly what they want, including rewarding themselves with more power by degrading our local election system.

And as if rigging the local election system weren't enough, the next step is to try to limit the number of people who can vote. After all, you don't want the wrong sort voting, do you? The kind of people who don't have passports or driving licenses. The kind of people who might vote for improvements to the welfare state or the national health service. Anything might happen if poor people voted. The idea of the poor being allowed to do anything probably brings Jacob Rees-Mogg out in a cold sweat. So, despite there being no evidence whatsoever that electoral fraud is an issue, the Tories are moving to require photographic ID before you're allowed to vote. Photographic ID that is disproportionately not possessed by the poor and the young.

I cannot imagine having voted for these people and then sitting back thinking, "Yep, this is the kind of thing I want more of. More corruption, more lies, more election-rigging." I used to at least understand those who voted for different economic and social policies, even when they were not my own views. But this? This shower of mediocrity and mendacity? We are governed by self-serving scum, and I no longer understand anyone who votes for them.