A day of drear and dread

They don't care.

They don't care about Russian interference in our democratic process, they don't care about the NHS in danger of a sell-off, they don't care that Brexit may have been a fiddle, they don't care that millions of pounds has gone to friends and associates of Dominic Cummings with neither tender nor result, they don't care for 50,000 deaths and counting.

This really is the reason for me not going into politics. If they don't care, you can't make them care; all you can do is wait for people to learn on their own accord. Honestly, were it not for my excellent mates, I could just avoid England for the rest of my life. I would miss the folklore and white horses, but that's an England in my head.

Anyway enough of that. Yesterday was a strange day.

Our tom cat was having a few straining problems, so we took him to the vet. It was the most peculiar consultation ever. We got to the car park, phoned in to say we had arrived, the vet came out to see us and we all stood masked in the rain, around Ralik in his cat carrier in the open boot of the car. After that initial discussion, she took him in while we waited in the car. When she brought him out, she gave us some medication and some strange news. We thought he might be constipated, turned out he just needed his glands dealing with (now there's a job!) but she thinks he is on the way to being blind. His eyes are cloudy and don't respond to light. She thinks he sees light and shapes but not much more, that his other senses are doing the work of his eyes.

This is a stunner. He looks directly at us, runs around the house, leaps upstairs and round the garden, follows my fingers when I wave them in front of him; in short, we have no reason whatsoever to believe his sight is failing. We could pay for an operation to have new lenses put in his eyes, but he's old and a combination of general anaesthetic and surgery could be too much for him. I don't want to take that risk while he is clearly living a life of grand feline quality. He's a very happy cat.

It left me a little down.

Then there was Mate, who, having b*ggered up his London life, departed swiftly to a new job elsewhere in the country and seems to have mysteriously b*ggered that up as well. All I know is that suddenly he's not about aspiring to the profession he trained for, but was looking at opportunities in another country which fell through because of Covid, and very recently he decided to start his own Youtube channel.

So he put together a natty little show with really interesting graphics, and away he went, about a certain kind of paranormal phenomenon. And he did some interesting interviews, plus a little footage which, at one point, yeah OK, looked a bit dodgy, but it never occurred to me that he might fake something. He asked me to subscribe to his channel - for free - as he needed 1000 subscribers before he could take it further in terms of advertising etc. So I did.

He was going to have a little live chat about his prog, and a couple of friends were going to turn up. I couldn't be there but we talked for a moment. I asked him: What do you think caused the orbs? A moment's pause and then the reply One of the pictures is faked. I am going to fess up live.

I was gentle with him, saying that the fakery wasn't the best thing to have done, but I don't think it was quite enough, and I am drafting a letter.

...It is important that you understand why faking the footage was a dick move.  It makes fools of your viewers and subscribers, it certainly won't bring ads, it makes people like me and L and J look at best like mugs for trusting you, and it casts shade on the people who let you interview them in good faith.

Two trolls crashed his live chat. They were mean, but were they wrong?

He's a good chum but he just consistently f*cks up, and I don't get why he keeps doing it. I don't want to be a fingerwagging Mama. His actual Mama (s) seem to stump up a lot of money and support for him from one scrape to the next, but there's age and anxiety there; they can't know the whole truth of just how ridiculous it gets. Even I don't know that. There has to be a point at which someone tells him not to be a twat, to go get some help for what I can't see as anything less than a serious drug problem, and if he insists on hanging out with his drug-dealing ex to accept that the life of a 50 year old rent boy is quite a precarious one.

I didn't say enough when he nearly got himself killed. Trying to be a nice friend I may be failing to be a good one.


Right, moan ended! Excellent mate comes up this evening for a weekend stay; time to clean up the house and get the party started.