Lotteries

This entry, on what is a deeply depressing morning for many millions of Brits, myself included, is going to be a curious mixture of politics and Spanish Christmas habits.

I wake up this morning scarcely recognising the country I've left behind. An election in which former mining communities like Blyth can collectively forget what life is like under a large Tory majority, in which Dennis Skinner's seat can turn blue, in which the final nail is being busily polished for Scotland's membership of the Union, feels fundamentally at odds with how I've always pictured the British nature.

That's not to say this couldn't be seen coming, as shocking as some results like the ones I've mentioned above may be in isolation. My partner has retained a resolute optimism that minds had changed since 2016, that our departure from the EU would ultimately never happen. It's an optimism I've never shared. A right-wing dominated press, owned by an ever-smaller group of billionaire barons, has been busy sowing xenophobic seeds which have sprouted healthily in the north of the country. Genuine belief that getting out of the EU and the supposed drop in immigration that would entail would make for a better future gave us the referendum result in 2016, and those people want what they voted for. They still seem to believe the lies they were told.

It's come down to that, in my opinion. Brexit has so divided the country, that it alone would have been enough to hand this election to the Tories. This was another referendum in all but name, but if you also throw in the constant vitriol the likes of the Mail and the Sun - still comfortably the biggest-selling papers in Britain for all that circulation is down everywhere - have thrown at Corbyn in personal attacks, you've got a Labour leader that many people regarded as unelectable to add to the anti-EU sentiment. Hence the total clusterfuck we have to digest today.

The crumbs of comfort have to be looked for with a microscope. My home city Brighton remains a little island of red and green in a sea of southern blue. The good people of Liverpool have not forgotten their abandonment by the Thatcher administration, and kept the city red. (Chin up, Hels.) I'm oddly pleased for the Scots. Separatism is anathema to me, but the fact is that they will now absolutely hold another referendum on leaving, they will absolutely vote to leave after the promises made to them if they stayed were (of course) broken, and will then remain within or rejoin the EU. So this separatist movement at the same time stands for unity - just with Europe, not Britain. A pretty damning indictment and admirably respectable.

If I hadn't already left, I'd absolutely be looking for a way out now. An increasingly isolated, deep-blue Britain tied ever-closer to a United States possibly still led by Trump is a dystopian future I'd want no part of. Those people to whom getting out of the EU was more important than, for example, not selling off the NHS - does anybody, anybody, seriously believe the Tory promises on that score? - will be the ones who most surely reap what they've sewn. You can bet your arse that the patrician class will be able to afford the drugs, won't have to wait in corridors, won't die of neglect in an American-style health 'service'. Maybe then, when it's too late, people will realise what they've done.

How do I pick myself out of the slough of despond that's in danger of settling? Ham and hampers. Obviously.

When I head to Britain for Christmas on 19th December, the enormous difference between how it's done back home and how it's done here will again strike me. There are, of course, a few lights strung across roads here. But it's nothing like even a small village of Viana's size would do in Britain. Nor do you see lights twinkling in people's homes, suspiciously perfectly triangular 'trees' outlined in their windows. It looks, basically, a lot less Christmassy. There are signs, though.

The most obvious ones are in the bars, which sell lottery tickets for the big Christmas draw. For some reason, Spaniards go completely crazy for the lottery at Christmas. Tickets for the biggest one are given as gifts, with some bizarre superstitions about not giving one from a different area to somebody who's gifted you a ticket from their area. The tickets all have the numbers already printed on them, you see, and are different everywhere you go. So you have people buying them everywhere they stop in Spain to make sure they've got loads of different numbers. OK, fair enough. Except. Ex-cept. Each of these tickets costs €20, and is known as a 'décimo'. That's because holding the winning number entitles you to a tenth of any prize that ticket may win, as they're sold in perforated sheets of ten. So you'd have to buy all the tickets of a particular serial number, costing €200, to take home the whole prize. These tickets are sold in their millions, despite the fact that on any given weekend the Euromillions jackpot can be bigger than the Spanish Christmas prize, the tickets cost a tenth of the price and if you happen to have the only ticket with the winning numbers on it, you keep the lot.

There are cheaper ways to get involved. All the bars also raffle off hampers, or legs of ham similar to the one I won in the half-time raffle at the football. The hams are tempting enough, but the hampers are absolute monsters. Clipped on the left-hand side of the image of this one is a grown man's coat to give you some idea of scale:

It has to be tied to the ceiling at the top,
to stop it collapsing under its own weight.

The way this works, you usually pay between €3 and €6 for an entry, depending on the size of the prize, and take a two-digit number from 00 to 99. Your name goes on a poster against that number, and if the last two digits of the big Christmas lottery match your two, congratulations, you've won the chance to wrestle the bastard home.

I shudder to think what me and my partner, the two of us already overweight, would do with one of these if we win it. Confronted with so much chocolate, biscuits, alcohol and top-notch ham, and dealing with a new year that will see the dawn of the post-EU, Tories-doing-what-the-fuck-they-want Britain, I've got a horrible feeling it'd all be gone by Easter. And that's being conservative. With a small c. A very small c.

There's a change coming

So, months have passed since my last blog entry. It's not like there's been nothing worth writing about - the current diplomatic crises, particularly with Russia and North Korea, our own political shambles and forthcoming election, the ongoing crisis in the NHS - I could go on. But when the will's simply not there, it just ain't there. That sense of despair I wrote about after Tump's election has manifested itself in my turning away from the news - for the first time in my life - and largely ignoring it.

I've still known what's been going on, of course; in the West the news media is all but ubiquitous. But that knowledge has only been broad strokes. I haven't really paid attention. Instead, I suspect like a lot of people, I've focused on personal stuff, and taking great pleasure in things that have gone well in my own life and those of the people I care about.

One of those things has been a long time coming, but is now in the process of happening. For about two years my partner and I have been seriously contemplating selling up in London and going to Spain permanently. We could see all too clearly what some of our family members are experiencing having worked hard all their lives, and hoped to avoid the same if possible and buy ourselves a little more time off work, as it were, than they've been granted. My own father died less than two years after retirement, and for around 18 months of that he was ill. My mum's stroke, which has left her partially disabled. My partner's mum is not in the best of health either, having worked bloody hard herself just as most people our parents' generation did.

Add those personal reasons to the broader stuff above, and you'd probably think we've got a pretty compelling desire to get 'out'. Well, it's a bit more nuanced than that, of course, as I'll explain below. It's taken a year to sell the house - thanks a lot, Brexit - but it's done. We're currently in Sussex, working our notice periods and getting ready to take car and cats out there. The contents of the house are already out there - more on that particular adventure in another entry. It's nearly done. I have two days' work left as I write this.

I've written in these pages before about the village where we're going to live. The work/life balance, the pace of life generally, the character of the people, the tranquility - all are considerably different to London. This is one of those chances that you have to take, I think, if the opportunity presents itself. We know what we're moving to - Viana doesn't change. It's probably not going to for the rest of our lives. Not much, at any rate. Therein lies the appeal, of course. But therein also lies the apprehension.

I said to my workmates, before my leaving drinks last Friday, that I'm extraordinarily fortunate by any measure. I've been blessed with a happy childhood, loving parents, friends that I'm proud to so name, jobs I've enjoyed. Sometimes. A partner I can never adequately live up to or properly explain her meaning to me. I've not suffered poverty or serious ill health. And anybody who knows me will know that I'm baling out on Sussex just as my football team has finally reached the top flight again after a 34-year wait. Complaining about pretty much anything at the moment would be self-absorbed to the point of solipsism and churlish in the extreme. So to be in a position to choose to make such a monumental change, to give up something that's so good anyway. maybe I'm pushing that luck?

What's swayed us, if I can speak for both of us, is the micro and the macro. That personal stuff gave us the initial trigger, and then what's going on at home and abroad seemed merely to serve up daily reminders that it was time to go. The country moving farther to the right, with a convincing Tory victory seeming likely (assuming they don't trip over their own feet as they seem to be doing their utmost to do). The appalling response of some Brits, both triumphalist and xenophobic in equal measure, to the referendum result. The erosion of the sense of tolerance and modern thinking that has always formed part of my pride in being British.

But, in London, and both working, we've been largely insulated from feeling those things personally. It's been more of a prickling sense that things aren't right out there than a jabbing pain of specificity. We've had it pretty good here compared to most. Even my partner, who's returning to her own home town in this move, has admitted to a sense of loss. Leaving a teeming London, where your door is locked overnight but anonymity is blissful and opportunity everywhere, for sleepy Viana, where your door never needs locking but everybody knows everyone else's business, will be a seismic change.

Locals have warned me about how hard it is over winter. Long, dark nights. Cold. Not seeing the sun. (I have to misquote Billy Connolly here - where do they think I'm from? Benidorm? Brits go whole summers without seeing the sun...) But the summers there are long, warm and reliable. We'll be able to travel. Getting back to Britain to see family and friends is cheap and relatively easy. If you're a child, or of a certain age where yoof stuff is no longer important, there can't be too many better places to be than Viana. We hope our friends will come and visit us, so we can share out just a little of that good fortune in our own hospitality.

So there may not be too much happening to us specifically which prompts me to write here, but who knows? I have so much to learn about leaving the London mindset behind permanently and settling in to another culture, that it may prove a rich seam. I'll keep you posted.




Edit: having just posted this, I've just seen the appalling news coming out of Manchester. Exactly the sort of horror that only happens in places where the shock value of it can be maximised. The likely ages of the victims of this atrocity, when they come out, are going to make unbearable reading. My thoughts with families and friends of everybody affected up there.

Reflection

So a couple of weeks on, then, and the first noises are already being made about 'changing Britain's relationship with Europe', Nigel Farage having to applaud, to his own apparent surprise, from the sidelines in the meantime. With a referendum on that relationship with Europe surely now a matter of time, Cameron is making it pretty clear from the first days of this government what it is that people have voted for.

So what happened? Has the country lurched to the right? Is everybody simply voting with their wallets, as I've maintained has been the case since the Thatcher years, now the economy seems to be improving? And why did the fully expected bashing meted out to the Lib Dems seem to benefit the very party they were being punished for getting into bed with?

The only predictable bit was what happened to the Lib Dems. As I wrote here some time ago, vote Lib Dem, get Tory, was never going to wash with anybody who'd put their cross in that particular box last time round. Paddy Ashdown's infamous claim that he'd eat his hat if their showing was as bad as exit polls suggested and Clegg's tearful, apparently shell-shocked resignation speech seemed to suggest that the retribution they suffered came as a horrible surprise to them, if nobody else.

You might have expected Labour to be the main beneficiaries of the collapse of the Lib Dem vote, but that's not what happened. The votes all seemed to go elsewhere - the gigantic swing to the SNP in Scotland, for example, decimated Labour in an area where the Tories only had one seat at stake anyway. And to anybody not voting Tory, the south of England makes for depressing map making. Head south from London and only my home city of Brighton & Hove breaks the blue monopoly. Those disaffected Lib Dems certainly didn't vote Labour.

For those of us not of a politically blue persuasion, there were still highlights, still things to please. The main one, of course, was the defeat of one Farage, N., in Thanet. There's no arguing with the number of votes UKIP gleaned overall - a worrying and slightly depressing sign that many Brits may well be blaming all our problems on immigration and a possible, if seemingly implausible, answer to that question of where the Lib Dem votes went. But their winning of only one seat, and Farage's failure to take his, are cause for some hope. Farage's predictable u-turn on his resignation, though, demonstrated that he'll still likely feature on the newly blue political landscape, even if it's only as a mouthy observer. George Galloway losing (and by 'losing' I mean being completely thrashed) Bradford West was also to be celebrated. Abominable man.

Where now for Labour? Realising, five years too late, that they should have elected the other Miliband, should prove sobering to the rank and file. David Miliband always had more charisma than his sibling, and his brother's campaign, essentially moribund, reflected that lack. In this era of personality politicians, where image is so much more important than manifesto promises that are no longer worth the paper they're printed on, he simply never inspired people. A genuinely fresh face is needed. I'd rather hoped my own MP, Chukka Umunna, a man seen as a rising star of the Labour movement and, importantly these days, regarded as pro-business and not too left wing, would be the new leader. He pulled out, though, feeling the need in the process to deny that an 'unwelcome press story' was his motivation for doing so. Odd.

Whoever they do choose this time, they have to get it right because they've got a lot of ground to make up - we've now got five years of Tory control with a small, but workable, majority. Five years during which the Labour leader will have to prove him/herself as a plausible alternative to the incumbent PM, probably campaign on a hugely important issue like EU membership, and try to find at least some common ground with a party which wants to break up the Union as it stands, if any credible opposition to the Conservatives is to be offered.