Well here we are, the much awaited Happy New Year's Day Blog post from the Shark Fisherman of Wales.
I'm glad it's 2022. Along with many others I tasted grief at first hand in 2021, losing my darling parents within two months of eachother in March and May. I had been dreading it for ten years and more, as a blog post from January 2012 reminded me this morning.
"I am obsessed with dying. I spend a lot of time thinking about death, my own and the demise of significant others. I think more about dying than I do about living. I don't know whether this is normal. That great word that means nothing. I have nothing to compare with. Probably not a great idea to do a vox pop on the streets of Aberystwyth and ask people. I often wonder that the activities we pursue and the busyness of our lives is a reaction to mortality. We cannot face the thought so we don't stop long enough to think about it. Perhaps as children we thought less of the possibility of dying but we knew that people did it, because we heard every day on the news that it was happening."
Looking back, the anticipation of loss and grief is actually worse than the reality. We are mortal. We don't live forever. This knowledge tickertapes endlessly in the minds that we have but when it happens it is still an enormous shock. I did not witness the exact moment of death but I was there in the immediate time prior and in the aftermath, instantly with my mother and within an hour with my father. Mam went first, at home, she didn't want to be treated in Hospital having been a nurse at the start of the National Health Service and to see the difference in the way it was run now. Dad, a gentleman till the end and nine years older than Mam let her go first and he soon followed. The shock of the news and the enormous number of pills he'd been taking daily for two years for heart, water, and blood and prostate had caused a blunt trauma to his kidneys.
What angered me most about the way that Dad went was the fact that he'd been ok outwardly, visually until Mam died. He then went into Hospital on two occasions and on one of these visits he picked up the Hospital bug M.R.S.A, so damned if you do and damned if you don't. You need to be treated but you might catch something in there that can kill you. At his advanced age it would have been awkward to kick up a fuss, 102 and 6 months exactly to the day of his birth that he died. Who knows, the tablets that he'd been prescribed had kept him alive longer than he would have been otherwise, we just don't know. It's just me thinking about them both now having walked through the Front door to a new year. They had both dodged the Covid bullets but old age and infirmity got them both in the end.
What saddened me about 2021 and 2020 alike was the way that human beings became just numbers and statistics on the nightly news. The elderly, health care staff, anybody and everybody became a number read out by the newly knighted in the New Years'Day Honours List. We still don't know for sure the origins of the virus and we will not know definitively. Looking back on the Spanish flu of 1918 now, was it inevitable that something similar would happen a hundred years later? Were we all just too comfortable and complacent before it happened?
Who knows? In 2022 we might get a fourth wave of Coronavirus. They are running out of Greek names. Chances are it wont be as severe but I am your typical social media knob with very little scientific knowledge so what do I know? The jaded public will just continue trudging through the mud arguing with eachother, hoping that the national past time of shopping, eating and drinking will finally be written into statute as 'essential'
One thing I have been predicting and even suggesting should happen is 'Civil Unrest'. I am hoping that 2022 is the year that the British Establishment starts to see the underside of many Doctor Martens Boots. As a long term Carer living on £64.70 a week for the last seven years and now being chased for a Universal Credit repayment I am really ready to kick off. I want to lay into the Establishment and its lackeys because ordinary people are having very diffficult lives because the upper echelons are maintaining the inequality through the class structure. Slapping yourself on the back every New Years Day by handing out gongs to the famous celebrities and some of the ordinary people with difficult lives blinds us to the Establishment Bear Pit.
I didn't march against the Iraq War. I was working in London at the time. Friends came up from South Wales to march. I couldn't be bothered to travel the short distance from Lewisham. I had swallowed the Bush and Blair line. I was so unconscious and so fundamentally wound up in my own soul misery that I didn't think marching would make any difference. Of course it didn't but I should have been on that march, Tony Blair shouldn't have received a knighthood from the Queen via the back door today and Jeremy Corbyn should be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Establishment Injustice via the Policing Bill will be writ large in 2022. My advice to readers of this blog is to bull your boots ready for it to all kick off. Their hope is that we will be broken and cowed by the Pandemic lockdowns. That like prisoners in Her Majesty's prisons that we will have learnt our lesson and have been rehabilitated by their punishing regime. As the landord of the now closed down 'Dublin Packet' in Caergybi said to me while handing over a pint of Guiness in the 1990s "What doesn't kill, cures"
I suppose it boils down to whether you are happy at the way that society is being run. Prior to Covid 19 it was insane and people want to get back to that normal? Can a change come without bloodshed? Hopefully, but there are bound to be a few bites and bruises along the way.
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