Good grief

Just when you think the world can’t get any weirder, it does. The American people elect Trump as their president – again. And then my sister tells me that she is delighted with the result because this man is a protector of women’s rights and a fighter for freedom. What?! In which fantasy world is that true, I’d like to know.

The orange man has begun picking his executive team: a load of billionaire conspiracy theorists. Well, why wouldn’t you? An anti-vaxer as a Health Secretary, a climate-change sceptic as Energy Minister and a woman who is known to have covered up child abuse, as the Minister for Education. See the pattern? As Charlie Brown would say, ‘Good grief.’ 

Meanwhile, Putin is threatening nuclear war, Netanyahu continues to decimate Palestine and its population and at Cop 29, fossil fuel lobbyists outnumber representatives from the ten countries most vulnerable to climate change. We shouldn’t be surprised. Money speaks louder and more persistently than people standing up to their necks in flood water. It always has. 

Back in the UK, Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, is pointing out the damage Brexit is doing to our economy. The remedy is simple: we need to rejoin the Single Market and the Customs Union and bingo! our economy and a load of struggling business will recover. But this is exactly what our PM, Keir Starmer, will not do. My most optimist friend confesses he’s lost his optimism. ‘At the next UK election,’ he predicts, ‘after five years of nothing much happening, we’ll have a Tory-Reform coalition.’ NO! I want to shout but, daily, I see this prediction growing legs. At a health check-up I’m told my blood pressure is too high and my response is, ‘Quelle surprise!’

But life in Eastbourne offers many distractions and, as Clive James says in his wonderful poem, The Crying Need for Snow, we look for ‘a finer field’ to ‘take our footprints in’ and ‘bring back a soft regime to bitter ground’. On Sunday, I’m awestruck by the performance of violinist, Blake Pouliot, who not only plays with highly spirited virtuosity but moves his body and stamps his feet in a joyful musician-violin pas de deux. I see another spirited performance by Arieh Worlthalter in the role of Pierre Goldman in the French recreation of the real-life court drama, The Goldman Case. The film quivers with energy from start to finish. 

We have a lecture on the street art of East London, which is great fun and another on George Orwell which is very bad for my blood pressure. The lecturer tells us nothing we don’t already know – why give a synopsis of Orwell’s two most famous novels, which everyone present has read? – and then uses the dubious devise of projecting Orwell’s politics into the 21st Century to air his own rather unsavoury views. Outrageous. 

Adrian organises a study day, entitled Ghastly Good Taste (taken from a Betjeman poem) which gives us a romp through some of the quirky, revolutionary and often unfathomable domestic interior designs of the late 19th and 20th centuries. The organisation of the day has sometimes kept Adrian from his sleep, so it’s a relief that all goes as planned and even more of a relief that it’s over.

Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, Jane Green, gives us a Tour of the Universe during which we marvel at satellite photographs of things in space: dust clouds, newborn suns and planets, that look like they’re AI generated but aren’t. We lose track of how big ‘big’ is and I begin to wonder what a god of the universe would consist of. I’m thinking about this because a few weeks ago, Adrian and I were invited to attend a church gathering where the former Chief Constable of Northern Ireland the Chaplain of Liverpool football club both bear witness to the existence of god in their lives. 

As I watch those images of the cosmos, this is what I’m thinking: The Christian god is a very human god whose manifestation on earth is a human male; a man that crucially is crucified and rises from the dead, the primary tenet of Christianity. But god, we’re told, is also omnipotent and omnipresent, so must surely be god of all the trillions of galaxies, solar systems and planets that exist in the vastness of space. Jane Green posits that, statistically, some of these planets will have life, but what sort of life? Not as we know it. So how does god manifest on planets where life is decidedly un-human? I can only conclude that if a god being does exist, then it exists in a form that is beyond our human imagining and certainly beyond the testaments of our Christian witnesses.