Another Year Older...

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It's one year exactly since I decided to start this blog. To be honest, I didn't think I'd last the first week writing it: but here we are, twelve months and four hundred and sixty-two posts later. Knowing how intrinsically lazy I am, this surprises me greatly, and I'm grateful for whatever it has been that's motivated me thus far to keep this up, as I'm pretty certain I'd have gone completely stir-crazy, at least in the months since I finished work.

The spread of content herein doesn't however surprise me, as I tend only to have focus when a goal is placed in front of me of whatever kind. One such goal is afoot with our local Covid-19 restrictions being eased a little, allowing some freedom of movement within Wales, although cross-border travel is still verboten: which will at least facilitate holidaying internal to the Principality. Getting the cottage finished is now more urgent than it was, and so to work!

Until this pandemic mutates into sporadic and seasonal epidemic form, politics and economics will continue to be a bit one-note; but when the inevitable, post-mass-vaccine world hoves into view, there will no doubt be a period of instability in British politics as the accounting and mud-slinging begins. On the evidence of the past year though, nothing this government has done has demonstrated that under normal circumstances they would be any different from a typical Tory administration.

The accounting period that will have to follow will highlight the serial failings, greed and misappropriations of a government in thrall to moneyed elites and big business, which as George Monbiot, David Attenborough, Greta Thunberg and many thousands of others have rightly been banging on about for years has succeeded in pushing our world to the edge of ecological destruction through what is, after all, a very narrow ideological distinction: value.

Monetization and commodification: knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, as our grandparents would intone sagely in attempting to instil some perspective into the minds of their offspring's offspring. Little did they know then the damage that ignoring that mantra would wreak down the line. We can only hope that the pandemic will have taught some lessons and that behaviours will be altered, but I suspect that when the fear subsides, bread & circuses will predominate once again.

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