Charles Charity’s Lionesses

And here we are again. What we’ve got to remember is that her Maj is something of an anomaly. When folk spend their lives steeped in privilege, told that they have inherent rights to power based on their emergence from the correct sets of genitals, how much can we blame them for believing it? At what point do we have to recognise our own culpability in a system that has just as much a chance of throwing up an Andrew, or indeed a Charles (don’t waste your time trying to convince me he’s some kind of prize – adulterer, accepter of funds from murderous regimes), as it does of producing a Liz.

Then again, as devoted and dedicated as the Queen has undoubtedly been over the course of her quite considerable reign, can we really say that she’s earned it? But this isn’t about the general redundancy of the monarchy in a modern democratic (and we’ve spent far too much time already moaning about the broken system we’re toiling under, meaning that a minority of the electorate has had an outsized say in those who govern over us) system. It’s about the boy who’s been told he would be king for far too long getting rather too big for his boots. I know they’re a national symbol (which in and of itself is rather laughable and a throwback to a bloodier, more possessive era) and the women’s team are doing very well indeed, but importing a load of lionesses for the sake of a charity fundraiser does seem like something of an abuse of power.

Maybe I’ve just picked this one because I’m sick of talking about the leadership race already (reason number seventy four that I’m unlikely to kick off a stellar career as a political journalist anytime soon). It’s definitely got nothing to do with an unhealthy obsession with royalty. Absolutely not. But maybe this is pointing towards a future where we don’t have to bother with the Windsors any more.

Desperate Sunak Seeks Thatcherite Ban

Wrapped up in far too many layers of nostalgia, that’s just one of the many issues facing the modern Conservative party. Heads jammed up their arses in rose-tinted views of decades gone by. I’ve seen Johnson described as a cut-rate Churchill impersonator (and that’s being incredibly generous) and now the blinkered simpletons that make up the selectorate are going to double down on the stupid by going for the tinpot Thatcher cosplay. A willing admission that they’ve got zero new ideas so bastardised versions of the supposed greatest hits are all they’re prepared to offer.

Hardly surprising that Sunka feels he’s got to do a little something about it. Not to the point of rolling out any sensible policy decisions (I know, because that’s not what the members are interested in. This is a strange tilted campaign – not an unusual one, of course, this is what we’re used to these days – where the vast majority of people able to tune into what’s being promised and pledge have absolutely zero say in the outcome), don’t be silly. Given that there’s been no one throughout the history of the Conservative leadership to look the slightest bit like Sunak, he can’t rely on similar moves so it’s just not fair. He’s got to find a way to level the playing field.

Don’t say it won’t come as a massive relief when Truss will be compelled to stop strapping on the pussy bows and whatever else she’s trying to rip from the wardrobes of the 80s. It’ll still be somewhat mystifying when the members opt for her over the brown man (Sunak being the lesser of two evils doesn’t make him into a decent candidate) but won’t she feel so much better for doing so on the back of her own ‘merit’ rather than pretending to be someone she isn’t? No, obviously. But I’ve had it up to here with all the blimming throwbacks.

Happy Birthday Baby Boy

They tell you that grief is love with nowhere else to go. They tell you lots of things. A year ago today I finished giving birth to you, the most painful event of my life because my body wasn’t ready. Nine weeks before you were supposed to come out but deemed necessary because you were already dead. I hoped it couldn’t be true. Hoped against hope that you’d come out screaming.

Instead, you were still and silent, so very beautiful and unmistakeably gone. I still loved you, as much as I did when you were still inside me. The only difference was then that I could hold you in my arms. And I was going to have to say goodbye far too soon.

My love has nowhere else to go, my hopes, my dreams, my expectations. A better writer than me described the experience of having and losing her first child as the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending. Guess that’s about right.

We’ve hurtled through all the happy bits of last year and now you are one. Are meant to be. Or maybe that’s meant to be in September. It’s hard to know for sure. I don’t have a lot of photos from July so it’s harder to hold onto the good memories of my last month with you. Someone described last year as a terrible one. While I don’t want to gainsay what anyone else has gone through, I disagree. Last year held so very much joy for me until it didn’t.

The first ultrasound, seeing you wriggle around so very much. Thanks to TV, I’d seen plenty of ultrasounds but they seemed so static compared to what you were doing on that screen, swimming lengths. Feeling a pulse in my belly and hoping that might be you. Feeling you in my belly, like champagne bubbles, and knowing for sure that was you. First kicks, big kicks, more ultrasounds. Sitting in the sunlight with family and knowing that you liked the dinner. Those memories didn’t go away when you died. I hold onto them for you. And for me.

Daddy and I are going to see you today, we’ll bring grandparents, and stories and flowers and the dog. Of course, it’s Daddy’s birthday too – it will always be Daddy and Sammy day on this day every year. We’re doing our best. The rituals might change year to year, we’ll find new ways to celebrate you, and it will still be your day. Love you sweetheart, always. Mummy.

Victory for Growing Risk

Given the fact that I’m distinctly British, the newspaper headlines are very much giving me end times vibes. And not just because of who’s looking likely to win the leadership (as I’ve said before, neither of them are exactly prizes. The awfulness was baked in long before we arrived at the final two). One of the pesky core truths pinwheeling around at the moment is that we’ve got multiple crises unfolding at once and no one at the helm remotely confident enough to counter what’s occurring.

We’ve got the climate situation that’s surging us ever more clearly towards a drought – driest July in over a a century apparently, the war in Ukraine adding extra awfulness to the disaster of soaring energy bills (yes, I’ve definitely got my priorities straight, why do you ask?), already revolting workers are pledging even more widespread strikes should certain leadership pledges come to pass and now we’re hearing ever more about the distinct possibility of an ‘accidental’ nuclear war with China. We’re really getting towards some proper season finale shit. Waiting with increasing frustration for the deus ex machina.

Oh, and in your daily remove-the-dipshit-from-all-his-spheres-of-influence-while-you-still-can reminder, it looks like Johnson is concerned about losing his seat. Rather than leaving the field with any measure of grace (ha!), he seems to be plotting a comeback to the point of offering slots in the resignation honours to folk in safer seats than his just so he gets another crack at the whip. While it would be hi-larious for this ruse to result in yet another seat flipping to an alternative party, it doesn’t seem worth the risk. Sure, he might be scrabbling around for any semblance of redemption and the assorted checks and balances of the levers of our politics might well be enough to save him but do you really want him putting any more norms to the test?

Sunak’s Screeching U-turn on Tube Strike

So, there was a giddy moment of actual drama. Not of a lasting kind or anything, but a temporary upset that at least lent a dash of spontaneity to proceedings. Obviously, I wouldn’t be saying anything in the slightest along these lines if any lasting damage had played out as a result of last night’s Tory leadership debate. As my brother put it, the presenter that couldn’t claim Covid as an excuse to duck out of proceedings chose unconsciousness rather than host the Truss-Sunak smackdown.

Anyhow, whatever the reason for it, Sunak has seen that if he doesn’t change his ways, he’s unlikely to get the brass ring he’s craving. Of course, he still hasn’t really explained why he even wants to be PM in the first place. The fact that he hasn’t made it clear, along with the vast personal wealth he’s accumulated through all that strenuous work and marrying into money, means that his agenda isn’t good. He’s very much the lesser of two horrific options but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

That being said, he might just be turning things around. Rather than toeing the Tory line about striking workers being scum and should be fired into the sun or what have you, Sunak might be on the brink of joining a picket line. Stay tuned.

Oh, and the Torygraph is reporting that Boris Johnson is tipped to become the next secretary general of Nato. Absolutely not. This is why it’s beyond important to reiterate the crap out of why he was removed from office at long last. It wasn’t because of an unpopular policy or him taking a stand on anything resembling a principle. Folk got tired of the scandals piling up at long last, of Johnson the lazy so and so proving himself time and again as unfit for office. That will not change. He isn’t shamed by this. He regrets nothing. He is not to be trusted with the tiniest scrap of power.

The Bitter End

I don’t care about the Tory leadership race. Not this week. A year ago today we shuttled from my GP practice to the local midwife unit to the hospital in the desperate search for a heartbeat. I couldn’t even bear to look at the ultrasound just before the consultant had to break the news that my 31-week baby had died and I hadn’t noticed.

As such, I am leaning into my impulses, whatever I want to talk about on my own blog, whatever I want to share of my shitshow of a journey to date. I just want people to understand that he really was a healthy baby who should have survived, who might have done with medical help if he’d been born just days or maybe even hours before he died, whenever that might have been. He shouldn’t have died and we still don’t know why it happened. I miss Sam so very much.

But we have a few more days until his birthday and there was another story I was in the middle of telling. The NHS is a wonderful, incredible, vital thing, but if I can give one piece of advice, try and avoid getting yourself into a position of hanging about waiting for drugs on a Friday afternoon. They called me at 4pm, we arrived at 5pm (traffic’s not great at the best of times) and I got stabbed in the bum with a needle at just after 9. My excellent husband came to pick me up with fish and chips.

After that, things seemed to be on track. As expected, I felt pretty rough and by the following Thursday I was feeling the old familiar miscarriage pains. Easy enough, crack out the period supplies, hold a hot water bottle close because you know your baby is on their way out so it’s safe (same reason you’re meant to avoid too hot showers or jacuzzis, you don’t want to get them overheated in the womb). My blood draws confirmed the theory – on Friday I’d had a 30% drop in hCG and 15% is all you need for the treatment to be considered a success. They palpated my abdomen just to check that everything was good. It was fine, no pain.

And then I woke up on Saturday feeling like I had on Thursday afternoon. Only worse. By the time I was crawling upstairs in search of the hot water bottle, I thought maybe I should call the hospital. They told me to come in.

After many hours, lots of pain, yet another uncomfortable ultrasound (with a lovely tech who told me her story – ectopic pregnancy with a ruptured tube, after which she went on to have a healthy little girl, now 11, courtesy of donor egg IVF) that showed a much bigger pregnancy with bleeding in the abdomen, I was finally wheeled into surgery. Another little mystery but it feels like a fairly safe assumption that some kind of blockage sealed the exits and Maby couldn’t get out. Cost me my left tube. They told me afterwards that it had ruptured and the bleeding had been a greater volume than when I gave birth last year.

That was just under a month ago. I’m still healing. I have scars now, rather than wounds. I’m allowed to lift things again, to walk my dog without fear that her general exuberance will rip things open again, I can make it through the day without a nap. Sometimes. Takes a while to really get over a general anaesthetic, or so I’m learning. And now we have to wait that little bit longer before it’s safe to try again (thanks to the methotrexate, got to build my folate levels back up again).

So, it turns out that I’m not pregnant again in time for my little boy’s first birthday. I won’t lie, when I pictured the day, I couldn’t help imagining a little bump.

Thousands Wrongly Told to Face Long Queues

It’s a bloody British nightmare. Frankly, half the reason a lot of people voted for Brexit was the idea, the lure, the promise from so-called ‘Project Fear’ that a departure from the EU would mean a whole lot of time spent in lines that wouldn’t have been the least bit necessary in times gone by. No one was quite prepared to swallow the line that we were going to be getting a bonfire of red tape in order to make those sunlit uplands that little bit more beatific.

So, the problem isn’t necessarily the queuing per se. Sure, plenty of people like the concept, but would rather than those being made to hang about. The longer they themselves are corralled into a winding line, the more apoplectic they become, enraged that the rules they cherish so very much have been made to apply to them after all. Still, what are you going to do? We’re fans of the rule of law, famed for it and everything.

The galling thing though, the problem at the heart of the matter is that it was the wrong line. The wrong folk made to give up endless hours of their precious time, whiling away the days until the reaper comes to pay a visit, because of the wrong intentions. I mean, people should have been encouraged by the fact that this would happen to mean that there’s more queuing about to happen.

Once you’ve had to waste so much time though, can you really be sure that going again will get you what you wanted? What even was that in the first place? Can you even remember? Do you even have a name anymore, let alone motivations outside the line? Who can say? You’re just a number now, reduced to the notion of how many are in front of you. Whatever comes your way by the time you reach the front is frankly your destiny at this point.

It’s No Longer Feasible to Take Back Control

We asked to be treated as a third country. This is what that means. It’s means standing around in endless lines in order to leave or enter the country because it’s no longer a case of glancing at people’s passports but of stamping, rigorous checking of details, intentions, plans and a whole lot else. Not a huge surprise that’s going to hold things up. Of course, the long waits have nothing to do with anything we’ve done. It’s all the French’s fault for not anticipating our bureaucratic insistences. Which definitely also explains why the same sort of travel chaos is going down at all the airports too. Bloody French.

As much as anything else, I am sick to the back teeth of the perpetual refrain of the outgoing PM and others of his ilk: we got the big calls right. How and why in the everliving everything does this keep being reported without any rebuttal? Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because of these ‘calls.’ They took us into lockdown late. They released elderly patients into care homes without testing. They ummed and aahed and prevaricated over supposedly ‘saving Christmas’ and let more people get infected and die for the sake of optics.

They are insisting that ‘living with Covid’ is far more important than, you know, doing absolutely anything to mitigate its effects. Face masks and ventilation and bringing back freaking free testing, none of that is the littlest bit more important than the culture war nonsense and pledging to bring the boot down on the necks of any and all refugees who dare to try and cross our borders. We’ve lost control, that thing that was so very important to the grumpy and marginalised. It vanished into thin air and we’ve been scrambling to concoct enough rules to magic it back into existence. We’re pretty much screwed at this point.

Row Over Economy Guru

I mean, on the one level, I can’t help but be relieved that folk like Truss are depending on outside help. But it’s definitely cheating. When a dim bulb like her gets to the top of the pile (somehow. There will be documentaries in the future to examine quite how and why this happened. Definitive crushing of the theory that we have a meritocracy in operation in this country. You’ll be able to convince me of plenty, but the idea that there are no more qualified candidates out there than her), she needs all the help she can get.

Government, now that’s the group activity. But this process should be the moment when the candidates stand on their own. Once they’ve won the crown, secured the brass ring or whatever metaphor we want to use for taking the reins of a whole damn country, they’ll get to draw from the same pool of folk for cabinet positions. They might have different sensibilities and loyalties or what have you that might change the make up of a potential cabinet but they’ve still got the same starter materials. This is about the head of the fish, and the slim chance we still have that maybe we won’t see another case of not so slow rot.

I’m hoping that this is where Sunak is coming from in his protestations – a desire for more integrity within the system. He’s decided to come over all noble and principled (you know, in spite of that whole FPN hanging over his head and the fact that he was still in support of the most corrupt PM in living memory). Rather than a certain level of jealousy over Truss’s economic guru, whoever they may happen to be. Getting adviser envy at this stage just isn’t becoming in someone campaigning to be beauty queen.

No Tax Cuts Until Mordaunt’s Revenge

Sadly, you haven’t missed the announcement of the latest summer blockbuster. It’s still politics all the way, baby. Coming up third in any contest isn’t the most fun, but when it’s a race to become leader of the country (let’s not have too many illusions about the longevity of this next portion of leadership. It’s going to be two years, max, before they have to call another general and do any of us really think that’s long enough to turn things around?) it’s rather more galling to lose out.

You can’t blame a gal for wanting to indulge the impulse to stage something of a dramatic exit. She knew she was losing momentum, that votes weren’t going her way, that the more the people saw of her, the less they felt like she was the one to lead. Which left her with some choices to make. Now, she’s not been in a ministerial position for quite some time, so it’s not as if she could leave a ‘present’ for who’s coming in next or even plant a bug or a virus or whatever the TV movie version of her would do with a ballsy enough screenwriter. And if she were a better political operator, she might have made it further through the contest.

So, she had to go old school. Or, more specifically, high school. Drinking games with her fellow leadership contenders. Sipping when she was meant to chug, surreptitiously emptying her glass whenever the others weren’t looking, she bided her time. Through all the never have I evers, and reminiscing about slightly less batshit times (yeah, I’m not sure when those were either), to the promised land of truth or dare. She did what she needed to do to make it binding and finally, she extracted promises from both of the finalists that they wouldn’t cut taxes until time and conditions of her choosing. It’s kind of genius and diabolical all at once.