dolorosa_12 | Like the ceiling can't hold us

The election result lifted me and carried me through the weekend. I was elated, full of energy, and unlikely to come down from this high any time soon. I do need to write a long email to my new MP (essentially a list of everything that is broken in this country that desperately needs to be fixed), but I need to be in the right frame of mind to do so coherently, so it will have to wait.

Matthias and I had deliberately taken the day off on Friday so that we could stay up to watch the coverage of the election, which was an excellent decision — since we were awake until about 8am, at which point my sister started texting me and wanting to have in-depth discussions about the political situation, but I had to postpone all that to have a bit of a sleep. I crashed for about two hours, then spent most of Friday in a dazed stupour, mustering enough energy to make a cooked 'breakfast' at about 1pm, and dinner later on, but otherwise lying around reading the Guardian's live feed and doing little else.

I woke on Saturday, however, fully recovered, went to the gym for two hours of classes, cooked a fiddly Timorese fish soup for dinner, and in general just got a burst of fresh energy every time I remembered that we have a new government, which was frequent. Today, I did a long, difficult, summer solstice-themed yoga class (because although the solstice has passed, everything just feels full of sunshine again), and then Matthias and I headed out to 'Aquafest,' which is a local fete-type event involving stalls, food trucks, and a race by teams of competitors with handmade rafts on the river. It was aquatic in more ways that one - torrential rain — but we had a few enjoyable hours eating food truck food, drinking glasses of prosecco, and watching the rafts paddle by.

Now the day — and the weekend — is nearly over, but it's been a good one, and I feel relaxed and restored. This article about how Liz Truss lost her (safe, with a massive vote majority) seat is giving me life. I'm floating, and I don't want to come down.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

luzula

Congratulations. : D

From:

dolorosa_12

Thank you!

Edited Date: 2024-07-07 04:25 pm (UTC)

From:

gingicat

Hoping that everything continues well.

andrewducker posted that James Timpson has been appointed Minister of Prisons, Parole, and Probation - may every cabinet position be as well-chosen!

From:

dolorosa_12

I saw that, and was genuinely impressed. Those kinds of appointments really show the depth to which Starmer and his team have been thinking about this, how prepared they were in advance, and the seriousness with which they are taking the problems which face them.

From:

senmut

I am SO HAPPY for the UK based on all I can see of it!

From:

dolorosa_12

It's amazing! I'm beside myself with delight!

From:

kore

"Very early on Friday morning, Liz Truss, a politician whose weapons-grade inability to read any room almost bankrupted the nation, appeared unable even to choreograph her own demise."

Oh that is BEAUTIFUL.

From:

dolorosa_12

I love every detail about the whole thing. Her former constituency is just up the road from mine, as it were, and I have visited at least one of the towns mentioned in the article, travelling on the train through exactly the sort of large pig farms that are described. I hate those fascists in Reform, but the notion of the Reform guy hovering up votes from people outraged that a massive pig and poultry farm was going to be installed on the fringes of their village ('Imagine the stench. Pigs are bad enough. But chickens too. She was very much for it,' he said. Before adding, conspiratorially: 'And word spreads in Norfolk.'), and the posh old-school conservative guy standing as an independent (I can visualise exactly the type; I met enough of them when I was a postgraduate student here) outraged at her lack of decorum and her party's constant, blatant lies — just to get her out so that the seat would go to Labour. It's priceless! (Her former constituency is, to put it mildly, not the sort of place that votes Labour.)

I have never encountered anyone so lacking in self-awareness, and every line in that article is wielded like a dagger. It's delicious to read.

From:

lyr

Congratulations! That's so wonderful.

From:

dolorosa_12

Thank you!

From:

corvidology

I'm still floating on the news... and refusing to be engaged in any discussions of the complete shit show US politics is right now because I don't want to come down that abruptly!

From:

dolorosa_12

A wise decision! Keep floating as long as you can!

From:

edwardianspinsteraunt

Oh goodness, I will never stop being gleefully delighted by Liz Truss' defeat! I've done some travelling in that area, and the fact that it's gone to Labour is bonkers - I was expecting some Portillo moments this election, but not that one. (I'd heard of Bagge's campaign, but I didn't think it would be enough to shift such an enormous majority.) It sends such a powerful message that her electorate wasn't willing to forgive her for her diastrous tenure as PM, or for being a generally useless, absentee constituency MP who had no concern for local issues.

From:

dolorosa_12

The whole thing was amazing from start to finish — even more so now that I know all the details. Well done, those voters!

From:

chestnut_pod

It makes me happy just to read about this! And then the good news out of France, too! Oh, hope is in the air!

From:

dolorosa_12

The important lesson I feel in both circumstances is to never give up, even when it seems hopeless. Don't preemptively despair, just ask yourself what you can do to prevent the doom that seems inevitable. Neither result just fell from the sky, and in the case of France in particular, it was the consequence of people — with the fascists at the gates — recognising the seriousness of the situation, working together, and making the right choices.

(I know you know this, I am just finding preemptive political despair extremely infuriating and had to vent about it.)

From:

chestnut_pod

It is infuriating! I guess I feel less like I want people to not feel despair, preemptively or not, I just wish I didn't think people felt the despair itself was work.

From:

dolorosa_12

I just wish I didn't think people felt the despair itself was work.

This, times a million.

I wonder a lot how much of it is deliberate (to create an atmosphere, particularly on social media, of outraged, despairing passivity that almost seems to discourage action), and how much of it is just subconscious, reinforced by the ubiquity of outraged, despairing futility in certain social media social circles. I think about this a lot.

From:

dhampyresa

Chaos! with Ed Milliband

From:

dolorosa_12

I was seriously tempted this weekend to change my tag for UK politics to 'chaos with Ed Milliband', but worried that it would make things too confusing.

Congratulations on your own unbelievably good political news, too! Well done!