The End of Something...

...and the beginning of something else.

Leaving Work

I left work yesterday for the final time before I began my University course in September. I'd given about three months notice but, for some reason, they had not managed to find a replacement by the time I had left. The work has been a little slack of late, though, so that might not be an immediate problem.

It's been rather a strange little job. Stressful, yes, but as if for no reason other than no body could think of any other way of doing it. Baffling. I asked one of my colleagues why, despite all the problems and inefficiencies, the company was successful and he thought that it was because there was little competition. One does feed off the other: if you are successful doing it this way, there is little reason to change. You'd think some big firm would have come along by now and bought the firm up, for the customer base alone, but no one seems to be interested in the market. Odd.

So, onwards and upwards.

On the way back from the job yesterday, I kept humming this: 



Seems appropriate somehow.

Down with the Monarchy, Up with the Republic

As an antidote to all the b***s*** which usually permeates this country where the Monarchy is concerned, I decided to join the Republican protest on the South Bank of the Thames, near Tower Bridge. Both sides of the Thames were cordoned off, tickets only. Most of the flag-waving crowd had been allowed onto the site first, with a couple of hundred protesters getting in early. Mid-day was the official start time, but the gates to the area were closed long before that. When I arrived, I noticed a small group with T-shirts and loudhailers and followed them, but, after trying to get through the cordon, we ended up outside a gate where we were told we were not to be admitted for health and safety reasons as too many had already gone through. Someone on the inside was contacted and came along with banners for us to hold and we staged our own little demo:

 

All very well and good, but hardly a real protest. We numbered about fifty until another, much larger, group joined us, swelling the numbers to about two hundred:

In the end it was claimed about a thousand, but five hundred, inside and out, was about right.

As for the cause, well, personally, I don't like the idea of being told, literally or otherwise, to know my place. If this country is going to be one worth living in, and it is the country of William Blake and Thomas Paine, all the unearned and inherited privilege and corruption (witness the tip of the iceberg that is the Leveson Inquiry) has to be got rid of. And that starts at the top. When people say that this is not a popular protest it's worth remembering that appeasing Hitler in the 1930's was a very popular government policy and that overwhelming majority were against legalising homosexuality in the 1960's. The majority are not always right.