Friday 7th June - Political Walk

Thursday’s was not exactly a full-day walk.  PDB11 and I arranged to meet at St John’s in Midsomer Norton at 12.30 for the Trio Paradis concert, go out to lunch, and go to Haydon in Radstock to deliver some flyers for the local Green Party candidate, Martin Dimery, after which I would walk home.

If you’re wondering why, after having shown no particularly strong signs of party affiliation in this blog so far, I have suddenly taken up canvassing for the Greens, it’s because, five years after the government declared a climate change emergency, they still aren’t behaving as though it is an emergency.  None of the main parties seems to be taking this nearly as seriously as practically all scientists seem to agree that we need to. 

The Conservative government seems to assume that, if we have made progress ahead of schedule so far in meeting emissions reduction targets, we’re going to reach net zero by 2050, and can therefore afford to relax and focus on other priorities.  It apparently hasn’t occurred to them that, if they have made the easy changes to the way we do things first, the hard ones are still left to do, so there is no guarantee that we actually will reach net zero by 2050.  But it also hasn’t occurred to them that the goal isn’t simply to meet an agreed goal of net zero by 2050, but for every country to reduce its emissions as much as possible, as soon as possible.

For much of my life, I have been voting Conservative – partly because of family tradition, partly because I didn’t like the way that liberal media caricatured and distorted anything that any Conservative politician said, and to a large extent because I reached adulthood under Tony Blair.  I had seen Labour governments bring in university tuition fees, the Iraq War, detention without charge for 28 days, and an attempt to compel everyone to have an identity card. 

Then, I had seen a Conservative government legalise gay marriage. It also allowed the country to hold a referendum on EU membership even though the then Prime Minister David Cameron didn’t want to leave the EU.  Whatever the result, he thought that people had the right to vote on what they thought the country should do based on what the EU was doing by 2016, rather than what people had been told the Common Market was for in 1975.

So, all in all, I hadn’t grown up thinking of the Conservative party as the more right-wing or authoritarian of the two main options.  I had also assumed that the British government was capable of making ethical and scientifically valid decisions without needing to be compelled to do so by the EU.  I didn’t expect it to respond to Brexit by aiming to create a ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants, or legalising insecticides which had been banned by the EU because they were killing bees.  I certainly didn’t expect it to pass a law dictating what decision a court is allowed to reach on whether Rwanda is a safe place to deport refugees to.

So, while I don’t like turning against the only British political party so far to have had any female or non-white Prime Ministers, I have to say that I don’t trust it any more.  I especially don’t trust it when it springs a General Election at such short notice that so far the only election leaflets I have received have been from the Conservative candidate (three to date, one printed in green, one in pink, and one in red but curiously none in blue) and that there isn’t an up-to-date election quiz yet on ‘Who Should You Vote For?’  because  most parties haven’t had time to put together an election manifesto.

So, PDB11 and I volunteered to deliver some leaflets for the Greens.  If we were being really, really green, admittedly, PDB11 could have caught the bus to Midsomer Norton and handed over the leaflets for me to walk with to Haydon (if I could be relied on to follow the map of which areas needed them to be delivered).  But he’s suffering from an ankle injury and wasn’t sure how far it was feasible for him to walk, so it was simpler to go by car.

If you’re wondering, this isn’t the reason why the first paragraph of this post is in green, or why I was wearing green clothes.  I’m just keeping track of the church year by following liturgical colours, and we are currently in ‘Ordinary Time’ (that is, not a feast like Christmas or Easter, or a fast like Advent or Lent), for which green is the traditional colour.  Apparently this represents growth, but I like to think of it as also representing thankfulness for the beautiful world that God has created.  I am certainly thankful to live in as beautiful a part of it as Somerset.

Anyway, I walked to Midsomer Norton, and to my surprise arrived rather earlier than I had expected, by 11.30, when the concert wasn’t until 12.30.  Thankfully, the church was already open for refreshments (there was a wedding booked immediately after the concert, so refreshments needed to happen beforehand).  I bought a cup of tea and a slice of carrot cake, and sat in a pew next to an older woman, Pat, who told me about the wonderful range of daytime events, such as concerts, going on at St John’s, which is particularly helpful if you don’t drive and therefore getting out in the evenings can be problematic.

We talked about many things: about her voluntary work in a food bank; about her granddaughter who is a carer for a disabled parent; about how different expectations of education are for modern teenagers like her grandchildren or my friends’ children from even when I was at school in the 1990s, let alone when she was young or when my father and PDB11’s father both left school at 15, mine to join the Navy and PDB11’s to train as an accountant.

It’s a relief being able to talk to strangers.  After being a recluse as a child and teenager, I started chatting to all sorts of people, like drunks on park benches or beggars in shop doorways, from when I was in my early twenties.  But in my late twenties, going through a period of severe depression and anxiety, I started to revert to childhood rules like ‘Never talk to strangers’, and sometimes tried to see if I could get through a day without speaking to anyone I hadn’t been personally introduced to (for example, going to a shop, filling a basket of groceries, taking it to the till and getting out my card to pay for them, all without saying as much as ‘Good morning,’ to the shop assistant).

The concert was much better when heard all the way through.  Afterwards, PDB11 and I went to Jacarandas for an all-day breakfast and a fruit smoothie each, which were tasy but probably more than I should have eaten on top of the cake I had had at the concert and the snacks I had brought with me, especially as PDB11 gave me his mushroom and his tomato as he doesn’t like these.  (I gave him one of my vegetarian sausages in exchange.)

After a heavy meal, combined with all the walking I’ve been doing lately and the fact that I had woken early in the morning, I dozed off in the car afterwards.  I woke in Haydon just in time to walk up and down the streets of this hamlet, pushing flyers through the letterbox of any house that didn’t have a sign saying, ‘We have no money.  We don’t trust politicians.  We found Jesus and sent him back.  Unless you’re giving away beer, go away,’ and where the householder didn’t call, ‘Get lost!’ as soon as she saw me approaching.

I don’t know how far I walked in real terms over the space of an hour or so.  On the map it shows up as less than a mile, but Map My Walk assumes that I was just walking up and down the street, instead of walking up to each doorway individually.  This was one of the days when wearing a pedometer would have been useful, provided it was reliable, but most of them don’t work for long.  The last one I acquired (new, but a very cheap brand) was recording 60% of steps I took by the third day after I opened the packaging, and 10% the day after, and then it gave up altogether.

At any rate, canvassing a few streets took until nearly 5pm, after which PDB11 drove home, and I walked home and arrived at 7.  For the sake of simplicity, I put the route into Map My Walk as if I had started the day in Haydon and finished in Midsomer Norton.  It came out as barely 11 miles - but they had been a very full 11 miles.