Ashes to Ashes

You won’t catch me getting on one of these outbound flights from Glasgow at the moment, what with a giant plume of volcanic ash lurking over the country like something out of Independence Day. It does make you realise how completely vulnerable we are to ol’ mother nature. A similar incident on a truly catastrophic scale helped to wipe out the dinosaurs, lest we forget, when a meteorite collided with the planet creating such a dust storm that blocked out the sunlight for two whole years. This kind of thinking helps to put a late running bus or bad haircut into some perspective.

But I’m a nervous flyer at the best of times and, within the next four weeks, I’ll be heading out to both Almeria and back, and then a week later to Brisbane. I usually end up sitting next to the sort of frequent flyer who seems to think that the whole idea of travelling in a pressurised container hurtling 400 miles an hour over 30,000 feet in the air is some form of grave personal inconvenience, like a traffic jam, while I’m reading over the safety instructions and clenching tightly throughout. And I completely refute those people who tell you that the more you travel the easier it gets. Sit them in the priority seats near the emergency exit, then, and see how the sudden weight of responsibility sits on their shoulders; and during that brief moment before all hell is unleashed, everyone will turn to you as you fumble about with the handle and scream “I only sat here for the leg room!”

And that’s without an apocalyptic cloud of dust clogging up the engines. So, no thanks, I’ll be fine down here for the time being.

The UK’s first televised party debate featuring our three would-be leaders would hardly have contested ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ in the entertainment stakes, although during Cameron’s impassioned closing statement (the bit where he said he’d “support us” when we start a family, perhaps by altering the mood lighting in the lounge or warming the bed up), it did look for a brief moment that he might break into a rendition of ‘I’ll Be There’ by the Jackson 5. That would have been quite a nice way of ending it, actually, particularly when they were all shaking hands at the end. Did you see Brown quickly launch off the stage to talk to the studio audience, leaving Cleggover and DC looking like they were waiting for the father of the bride to return to have his picture taken with the rest of the guests.

Clegg certainly looked fresh, savvy and not even half as sidelined as many people would have thought, like he was the head boy who had been invited to ride at the front of the coach with the teachers, and probably won over many “hearts and minds” in the process (a terrible cliché, so overused that you’ll now hear it to describe new managerial recruits on ‘Football Focus’ almost as much as within the halls of Westminster), but did you notice how he continually looked down the camera lens and directly into our slightly befuddled, over thinking faces, instead of the “old parties” (Clegg’s words), who darted around the room like they were addressing a party conference. When Brown and Cameron were throwing muck at each other, Clegg bizarrely seemed to adopt the high ground, even nonchalantly putting his hands in his pockets at one point, like he was down the pub.

Brown was assured but prone to backlash tactics, dismissing the Tories for their healthcare reforms and ways to address the deficit. David ‘Call Me Dave’ Cameron used a puppy dog expression throughout with all the sincerity of a talk show host. I should point out that I am writing this on the evening of the debate and have therefore not been subjected to the inevitable barrage of media scrutiny over every minute detail, from the colour of Brown’s tie (pink, not red, why?) to whether Clegg seemed to drinking more water than the other two. Whether decisions will be made on the basis of such idiosyncrasies is debatable, but it will be intriguing to see whether such a hyped TV debate which garnered such tremendous viewing figures should consequentially pay dividends on polling day.

And it wasn’t much a debate, either, with an audience too self-conscious to even uncross their legs in case an audible creak of their chair might contravene some pre-arranged gagging order. Jerry Springer, this wasn’t, not that ITV’s Alistair Stewart isn’t prone to certain theatrics, bellowing cue commands like the voiceover on ‘University Challenge’. But still, this was a landmark occasion, one that will no doubt be the norm from now on, turning our politicians into personalities in the process. And a landmark for another occasion: not a single advert shown on ITV for over 90 minutes!

Of course, I know the real reason why you people keep reading this blog. It’s because of the bees, right? Well, now that you mention it, the Sunday papers are urging us to not cut back our shrubbery this summer for fear of disturbing our limited number of bees from aiding the pollinating process. The number of bees has dwindle frightfully in recent years (I would imagine in direct correlation to how we continue to build on things that we probably shouldn’t), which is quite scary considering their importance in the general fabric and make up of life itself. But since returning from my regular Sunday jaunt it appears that bees are thriving alongside our nearby allotments, which is pleasing to see, even if they do like to fly directly into your face. And that’s the thanks we get.