It’s been quite a week and I’ve not written a word about any of it. If you were sometime in the future looking back on this blog for source material of how middle-aged nobodies felt about life then you might be fooled into thinking that we are all content.
Teachers fall, exhausted, into the final half term holiday of the year. Reports, data, plans for shows, concerts and school trips, occupying too much brain space when behaviour management is taking every ounce of energy. A cold will inevitably appear. After the last few years where there has been so little money in school and even less in the services that support schools the announcement made in the rain by a drowning prime minister might have had us jumping for joy.
I suspect that fellow teachers of my age are also too exhausted for jumping.
Despite the announcement feeling like a metaphorical moment, I sent my daughter a text.
‘I haven’t got the energy for a General Election. Thank goodness I’m not an MP.’
It turns out that many of the Conservative MPs feel similarly. So far, a record breaking 80 conservatives have declared that they won’t be standing.
I’d like to pretend I’m impartial but I’m not. I want Labour to win. They don’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to believe Kier Starmer is the most interesting, beautiful man on the planet, I just need them to win. I need funding for programs like Sure Start, SingUp, manned Health Visitor clinics and for the NHS waiting lists to go down. I want a shift of focus on how they spend what little money they have. I’m realistic enough to know it won’t be perfect and that as soon as they say they would consider raising taxes, at a point where everyone feels as though they have less money and people are more post-pandemically selfish than they’ve ever been, then they will probably lose and that terrifies me.
I say this as someone who was there, in my living room, in 1987, completing my first election spreadsheet (hand drawn, of course). The Conservative Party had run the NHS into the ground and had some dodgy dealings with a helicopter manufacturer. Neil Kinnock appeared to be a great, charismatic leader and didn’t own a single Michael Foot donkey jacket. The bump from the Falklands war was over and veterans were on the telly showing us their disfigured faces. And although they had won the miner’s strike, many couldn’t forgive the Tories for such heavy handed tactics. Nobody really knew which way it was going to go because there was a fetishist-love for a woman in a suit skirt, weird sleeping habit and a purposely lowered voice. Then on Wobbly Wednesday (or whichever day it was) my parents decided to host a “Goodbye and good riddance Maggie party,” because the polls suggested Labour would most definitely win.
It seems odd to cite that election as the one where I realised that perfection was the only way the Labour Party would win an election, when in 1992, Neil Kinnock lost an un-losable election by falling over on a beach and in 2015 Ed Miliband ate a bacon sandwich. However, as the evening of 11th June 1987 wore on and began to turn my living room into the commiseration bender of all benders, it became clear that I didn’t understand the world.
Anyway this election is the Labour party’s to lose by all accounts and that terrifies me. It seems to have put the fear of every one of Rishi Sunak’s gods into him too. So worried that he might win, he took the day off yesterday to come up with a series of policies that would help. Today’s announcement made the Long Suffering Husband swear at the radio, even though his golf-club buddies will no doubt be rubbing their thighs with excitement. We all love to hark back to a mis-remembered past and so those who are old enough to know it existed but not old enough to have done it get very excited by National Service.
If that doesn't work for him, I have some other suggestions. We could bring back quicksand, killer bees, piranhas, random unattended boxes of matches, tablecloths, pans on the stove, strangers or even, if they're desperate The Bermuda Triangle.
Or, maybe, we could get Barry Manilow to sing about the Conservative government and they would disappear too.
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