fairly local...

Missed the last couple of months of news in the UK? Need a quick catch-up? Well, you're in luck. Allow me to summarise:

Welcome to Brexit Britain. We don't bother the outside world, we don't want it bothering us.

Our future will remain ever Local.

You voted to Remain?  Well, your mind has been corrupted by colours, sounds, and shapes...

There's nothing for you here.

--

There you go.  All caught up.

it's the only thing that there's just too little of...

I've been thinking a lot about anger this week.

Well, to be honest, I've been angry quite a lot this week.  I was angry as a teenager, but I think I've actually grown up to be quite even-tempered.  It might sometimes appear to be otherwise, but I loathe conflict and will go well out of my way to avoid it.

But this week has nearly broken me.  I'm angry and ashamed at the state of my own country.  It's bad enough that a majority of people voted in the referendum to leave the EU, but what's happened since then has been just awful. Most depressing has been the rise of racism and the plummeting descent of national debate into the gutter.  This hasn't come completely out of the blue, and we had a taste of this in the last General Election, but watching people hurling abuse and hatred and suspicion at refugees and also at the people who dare to show them an ounce of compassion has been depressing in the extreme.  52% of voters in the referendum voted to leave the EU, but that doesn't make the other 48% traitors or remove their right to speak up.

Ugh. I can feel my blood pressure rising just thinking about it.

But, you know what?  This is no good.

John Lydon famously said that "Anger is an energy", and maybe it is, but it's not a positive energy.  One of the best pieces of advice I've ever received is to try to worry about the things that you can control.  I find this incredibly helpful when thinking about my health in particular, but maybe that's something I might be wise to try and apply here too.  I can't change the result of the referendum.  I tried debating with people who were thinking of voting leave, and essentially nothing that I said was ever going to change their minds.  I was wasting my time. I'm not sure that anything I say now is likely to change anything either.  It might upset and annoy me that people feel this way, and I find it very hard to understand, but getting angry about it doesn't help anyone... and it definitely doesn't help me, because it just makes me feel impotent.

Buddha apparently said "holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die".

I think maybe he's right.

Why don't we try just being kind to people? I'm not asking you to be reasonable in the face of someone idiot racist calling you a traitorous bremoaner, but you can just be a little nicer to the people around you... whether that be at home, at work, on the bus or wherever.  I'm going to give it a try.  It can't hurt, can it?  I want to try and do something positive, because I'm sick and tired of all the anger and all the negativity. I can be in control of that.

...although, it's so hard because they are *such* arseholes.

drink...

I popped into my local beer shop on Saturday.  It's just around the corner and is a proper, local affair that sells all sorts of beer, but specialises in beer from around this area and the North of England, and also has a splendid range of interesting Belgian and Dutch beers. I've been a big fan from the moment that I heard that they were opening. I mean, why wouldn't you love a shop that's literally 100m from your front door and, as well as a very good basic range, also stocks Oktoberfest beer in the Autumn and a wide selection of seasonal, dark beers in the winter.  Their tastings are pretty good too.  What's not like?  Not only am I in there quite a lot for myself, but to everyone's satisfaction, it's also now the source of my Christmas presents for my dad and both of my brothers, as well as being my go-to source of almost every other gifting occasion.  The guy who runs the shop -- Nick -- is a fan of the Leicester Tigers, but no one's perfect.

I haven't been in there for a few weeks, but I decided to nip in before the rugby started to make sure I was adequately stocked up.  Nick was in:

"Hello there Tim. Have you been having a dry January?"
"Hell no!  Why ever would I do something like that?"
"Oh, it's just that I've seen you around quite a lot - running usually - but you haven't been in the shop since Christmas.  I just assumed that you must be having a dry January and were on a health kick or something...."

Well, the simple truth is that I haven't been in the shop for a few weeks because I got given a lot of beer for Christmas (give and ye shall receive, eh?) and have been drinking my way through that stash... but you have to love having a local beer shop where they know you by name and worry you might have given up drinking when you don't show up for a few weeks.

I don't think I drink quite enough to be single-handedly responsible for their profit margins, but you know what they say about small businesses: use them or lose them.  And in this instance, I'm more than happy to do my bit.