When Mrs May called the General Election in
April 2017 Virginia had begun to feel quite positive again. The arguing online
had dropped off and her desire to commit long distance murder by witchcraft had
been kept in abeyance for several weeks. But as the campaign proved to be so
utterly dismal Virginia’s spirits sank and the old habits and patterns of
thought returned. There were other political issues, too, unconnected with
Brexit which drove Virginia as bonkers as the next sane conservative. Virginia
considered all that Gerald Warner had said about May and wondered at his
accuracy in predicting what Britain under her leadership would be like. Perhaps
he had some special powers of his own?
The election campaign was a disaster and
Virginia began to believe that all was lost, as far as Brexit was concerned.
She had put a little spell on Ben Gummer, who had written the manifesto,
nothing too awful, he was young and stupid, and it was his father Virginia
really didn’t like, but she couldn’t let the whole affair go unpunished. Gummer
duly lost his seat and Virginia allowed herself a little dance of victory
around the bedroom. The music she chose for this was the Soler Fandango for
harpsichord, in a crazily fast and not entirely accurate performance by Jean
Rondeau it seemed to go with the thought that she had won a fiery, ginger scalp
in her dark political battle. She danced so fast along with it, making great balletic
leaps in the air, from time to time, that she was soon exhausted and collapsed
onto the turkey carpet, panting and laughing maniacally.
These little spells did not require much
effort, one did not need any kind of a gateway, only sufficient determination
and vehemence in one’s antipathy. They couldn’t cause actual bodily harm, or
death. But even so Virginia felt she must not indulge herself with this kind of
black magic, any more than the more serious kind. Fairy-tale and fable were
full of stories about the effects of one small misstep changing fate or the
course of history. She knew that her mother had been sorely tempted to put a
curse on Denis Healey, but she had resisted and, in the end, the dreadful mess
Healey had made of the economy resulted ultimately in the election of Mrs Thatcher.
Sometimes things had to go deeply wrong, in order for a nation to learn its
lessons and heal its wounds.
Sometimes Virginia thought the Civil War in
England was more or less a direct result of all the witch hunts of the earlier
part of the 17th century. Alison and the Kineburn women were some of the very
few in the country to escape death for their practices. But just because a
great many witches had been put to death, it did not mean the gifts had died
out within the families. The skills were innate, inheritable. It just meant the
wisdom of the senior women was not passed on to the daughters and nieces and
grand daughters. Without guidance the new generation were lost and had to find
out the hard way, the knock-on effects of their careless curses. By the time of
The Glorious Revolution Virginia reckoned that that first, post-witch-hunt
generation of women had worked out the rules again for themselves and stability
had returned to the nation, by the end of the century.
Of course men had died at an earlier age than
women throughout much of history and so it was women who had traditionally been
regarded as a nuisance and encumbrance. The Poet had probably been massively
outnumbered by them and had been driven to his accusation by irritation at
their collective ignorance and power, though he had done nothing to improve
this ignorance in his own daughters, leaving them illiterate despite his own
very great learning. Nowadays it was the elderly in general who were held in
contempt and regarded as a nuisance. Post Brexit it had suddenly become
acceptable to berate them, to wish them dead. The old were no longer valued for
their collective or individual wisdom, they were wished dead out loud, in
public, online and in print, by men who were hardly ranked in the spring
chicken category themselves. Because they were not progressives these old gits
could not be considered wise. Wisdom, which came with age and progressivism
were polar opposites, but the progressives, of course, could not admit this
self-criticism. Wisdom was not mentioned therefore, old people were just
insulted as insufferable, stupid nuisances and according to these progressive
and tolerant liberals the world would be a better place when they were in their
graves, no longer using up precious resources and preventing children and
students from attending European universities. Virginia had met the Poet in
dreams, and had a kind of recollection of his face, but during daylight hours
his features morphed alternately between those of Iain McEwan, A C Grayling, Philip Pullman and
Richard Dawkins.
When the dreadful fire at Grenfell Tower
happened, Virginia had a week or two of sympathy for Theresa May. It was another
peculiarly contrary response, because Virginia felt she understood May’s
totally wooden, very English, stiff upper lip reaction. This was exactly how
Virginia would have reacted herself, had she been involved in person. Inhuman,
robotic, totally unable to say the right thing, or form her face into a suitable
expression. So, Virginia started a rumour online that Mrs May had Asperger’s
syndrome. She’d read so many books on the subject lapping up everything by
Simon Baron Cohen over the years, she was able to sound quite convincing in her
descriptions of May’s behaviour, as it pertained to her diagnosis. She got
terribly bollocked by others making comments online, but the rumour took off,
and Sarah Vine wrote a public denial of the allegation in the Mail.
Because Virginia had not been involved in
person with the Grenfell disaster she was able to weep for days on end at the
thought of it. The political and economic decisions that had led to it, the
mad, blackness of the green mania. The madness of the red mania, and the
corporate greed of the globalists, squashing human beings in, like tinned sardines,
stacking up human beings in piles, selling them for cheap labour. It did occur
to her to wonder if the fire had been created by a mischief maker such as
herself, who could not have known the severe consequences of her actions,
believing in the idea that ‘Health and Safety had gone mad’ and therefore
nothing was flammable these days, so no real harm could be done. It was
typical, Virginia thought that ‘Health and Safety’ really had ‘gone mad’, where
it impinged on the lives of ordinary people. Virginia had been used to light
the fires with plastic bags and bottles on wet days, when she’d run out of
shop-bought kindling, or firelighters, and the coal was sulky and unresponsive
to damp twigs from the garden, but these days you could not get plastic bags or
milk bottles to burn at all. The right of a subject to keep warm was not a
right enshrined in the Declaration of Rights, that the Monarch had a duty to
uphold in order to keep her Coronation Oath, but surely it was a natural right,
or perhaps even a modern ‘Human Right’. And one ought to be able to burn one’s
rubbish, if one so wished in order to keep warm, without wasting half a box of
Swan Vesta’s in the effort. And yet here was a firm producing highly flammable
material to ‘insulate’ high rise buildings with, because insulating things was
‘green’ and if something fitted ‘green’ ideology on the macro level, then
considerations of ‘Health and Safety’ were nowhere.
Virginia had started a house fire once, by
mistake, well a chimney fire, that might have become a house fire, had not a
dog walker noticed it and dialled 999. She had not started it by trouble
causing, or mischief making gone wrong. She had had the chimney swept only a
couple of weeks before. But the chimney sweeper had been very elderly and perhaps
didn’t have the strength required for the job. He had managed to get a couple
of bin bags full of soot out, but he had spent a great deal of time telling
Virginia his life story. Virginia, despite regarding herself as a witch, had a
kind face and nice, sympathetic eyes, and the world seemed to be full of middle
aged and elderly men who wished to tell Virginia their life stories. Virginia
sometimes wondered if she had taken on some of the characteristics of the old
furniture whose very timber had absorbed the life stories of the people to whom
it had belonged. Virginia wondered if the way her soul had mingled with those
fragments of other lives in dreams had ‘magnetised’ her, so that other people
handed over to her their life stories for safe keeping.
Anyway this old chap had eventually become a
Mormon and discovered he had a gift for writing hymns. Virginia did not know
any Mormon hymns, so she had no means of testing the validity of his claim to
have written the two or three which he proceeded to sing to her. But they were
really beautiful tunes, made more so by his tremulous, high tenor voice and
being sung in Virginia’s huge 18th century drawing room, with its marvellous
acoustic, as the golden sunlight poured in through the tall, east and south east
facing sashes on that mid-autumn morning. Virginia was so taken with this man’s
story she might have been converted herself. He claimed to have been moved by
the spirit to invent his songs and the words and he had left school at twelve
and worked as a coal merchant, so he most certainly had not had any formal,
musical training. Virginia was fond of Mack Wilberg and the Mormon Tabernacle
Choir, particularly ‘Let Peace Then Still The Strife’. She was genuinely moved
by the occasion and accepted the Book of Mormon the old sweep gave her as a
parting gift. She usually kept it in her glove box, as a kind of talisman.
Anyway, a couple of weeks later, Virginia had
been burning some sticks and stalks and a rotten plank or two from the garden
stacked up tall in the basket grate when the fire had started. The fire
services were obviously at a loose end that afternoon, because several engines
turned up, from different parts of the region. By the time they arrived Nick
and Virginia had already put the fire out in the chimney. They had put the long
ladders up to the hatch in the loft and run up and down with buckets across the
length of the central beams which led to a further ladder and the opening on to
the flat, lead roof, where one could access the drawing room chimney. They
poured several buckets of water down it and the crisis was over by the time the
firemen arrived.
Virginia was glad the fire brigade were able
to reassure them that the fire was well and truly out and that the fire brigade
was not useless and slow in responding as the police and ambulance services
were often accused of being. Virginia had been particularly glad to see so many
handsome, muscular young chaps dashing about her home and one in particular, a
beautiful Brazilian boy had been of such particular interest, with his nice
arse and nice face that Virginia had wondered why she had ever wondered if she
were a lesbian.
Often Virginia found herself wishing she
really had the power to make a positive difference, to people’s lives and be of
use, of the sort others would be grateful for, rather than just making various
kinds of mischief. At one time she might have thought of entering politics, but
these days ideas alone were no good. May had proved you couldn’t get away with
being a buttoned up old bag and Dianne Abbot had shown one must have a brain
for numbers and statistics, for the interviews, which Virginia, who had failed
her maths O’ level did not have. Then there was her Disqus history, which was a
little problematic. As the kidz at Oxford labelled Virginia’s way of thinking.
Fortunately, Virginia had never got the hang of Twitter. Virginia always used
her own name, online. Knowing the power of names, and the difficulties caused
to people like her, when real names were hidden, made Virginia determined, in a
counter intuitive way, to let hers be known. She thought the force fields
around her, created by her own gifts were strong enough to withstand most
attacks from her own sort.
In September the Withdrawal Bill was passed
and there were a few days of hope, then as Summer became autumn, officially,
the political weather turned to drizzle and rain and winter became a certainty.
Mrs May gave her Florence speech.
Virginia had to admit to herself that she was
surprised May had the wit to deliver her devious, dreadful speech in the city
of Machiavelli. Briefly she wondered if May had found a way back and had sought
political advice from the master himself. But her vanity prevented her from
believing Theresa capable of such a thing, since she could not bear to believe
that those on the other side could have such an advantage over those whom she
regarded as good, politically. And yet had Virginia thought of arranging such a
consultation herself, had she had sufficient skill, that is very much what she
would have done. An awful, previously unknown work by Boulez started crashing
about in Virginia’s mind again, played at a first rehearsal, by the Portsmouth
Sinfonia.
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