JohnS' Random Rants

Loads of greenfly in the garden, so I ordered some ladybirds which arrived yesterday. Followed the instructions, sprinkled water all over the leaves so that they could have their drink before heading for their onerous jobs of eating and mating.

They didn't want the leaves. They just crawled out over my damp hands and supped there. Then I coaxed them on to the leaves of the crabapple tree and the aquilegia, the latter being hopelessly infested. Went out this morning, I could only see one ladybird tucked away among the purple petals. I think it's asleep.

I am very tempted to get more, but worry that a lot of ladybirds will mean the end of the aphids entirely and therefore the end of the ladybirds. So we shall leave it for now, see how they go.

The day before I finally made my way to Maggie's in Edinburgh (https://www.maggies.org/our-centres/maggies-edinburgh/). This is pretty amazing, based on the experience of Maggie Keswick Jencks who was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer back in the 1990s, and having just received the news, had to wait and digest it in a hospital corridor, cheerless, silent, window-free. Q Maggies, based on creating a kind comforting space, developed into a provider of counselling, courses, respectful listening and loads more, no need for a referral or appointment, you just walk in. There's no smell of sorrow to it, or that overbright effort that can accidently invade a place, but there is free coffee/tea and cake. The layout is warm, light, cheering, with that sense of a kitchen table at its heart and rooms spread out from there, with views of the outside gardens from all windows, and the gardens themselves a sensory pleasure. I walked there and smelled the wild lilacs. Turns out you can do a lot with an old stable block/cowshed and some kerbside. Maggie didn't live to see her legacy, but I hope she's somewhere and can feel for it now. It really helped.

And then yesterday there was a catch up with chums, a new boutique in town that could easily chew its way through my purse like a ladybird through aphids.

And while I know everything is not all right yet today looks beautiful. That's it, that's the gift. That, a handful of ladybirds, and a place like Maggie's.

I read Keir Starmers speech yesterday. As the child of immigrants, I'm going to put aside my feelings of indignation at the tone implicit in the words, and try to pick apart what he is doing. Because I would rather do this than the thing I must do today. Any minute now. But not yet!

OK, so he's never going to win the far left of his party and he never was. They haven't forgiven him for Jezzah, they think he's tory-lite etc etc. He probably is tory lite. He made himself presentable to a country that was sick of the terrible parade, Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak. He did not so much win as the Tories lost. He inherited a country that didn't really care for him but was beyond weary of the alternative. To the far left he's the Unforgiven, to the far right he's the Unbearable and anyway, the far right are nabbing tory votes at what seems like a rate of knots. They need nothing from Starmer except his departure. They are the enemy I think he sees, though of course parties like the Lib Dems and the Greens can bite a chunk out of Labour and Tory majorities alike. So where's his battle ground?

His language in this speech will please the far right, some of the centrist right, and certain elements of the left. It may also please President Trump's govt, as a kind of echo in understanding, diplomatically sealing a sense of kinship, but there's also been a historical root among the demographic Formerly Known As The Working Class*. People forget that protectionism has sometimes been a part of the Left's defence of workers rights. British workers have often worried about being undercut by cheap labour from overseas. The issue then, is that they must be ready to be that cheap labour themselves and my totally amateur suspicion is that they are not.

To the untrained eye the Prime Minister appears to be constantly playing a double game. He made this speech about clamping down on immigration, but he has signed a trade agreement with India which, it will be argued, benefits Indian immigrant workers at the cost of British workers. I don't know enough about this to know whether it's just more of the same old racist hysteria that threads its way so often through our political discourse. I do know that, on the surface at least, his speech and his trade deal may be seen to contradict each other.

Of course, people see what they want to see. There may be an active balance, an equity within these seeming paradoxical approaches, but ostensibly they give off a shifty vibe as does he. His only way out is to make the voter richer. Comfortable people do not vote for change.

I found that speech antagonising. This guy panders to those he needs, ignores those he thinks he's got in the bag. He relies on people like me to hold our noses in the vein of NeverFarage, forgetting that NeverTrump failed for the Dems, and Wheesht For Indy failed for the SNP.

There may come a temptation, for the first time ever in my life, to just spoil my vote at the next election, and if a Reform/Tory alliance ends up as the fulcrum in parliament, badger my patient hombre into getting some position as far away from this cavalcade of goons as possible. I hear Dubai is nice pretty much all year round.

*With apologies to Prince.

Well, I bit on the bullet. R has suggested to me for some time that I am not OK, that I am clearly depressed.

It feels like I don't have any right to Depression. The cancer's gone. We check in August and perhaps there's a possibility of it returning, sure, but right now I have a lovely life and I should be enjoying it. Sometimes I am enjoying it. My base mood though, is often low. I contacted Maggies (https://www.maggies.org/our-centres/maggies-edinburgh/) who phoned me back within two minutes, suggesting I come in to talk about counselling options. This makes sense given the numbers of courses they do. Phone counselling is available too, but first they would like to meet. I can drop in any time and will do, over the week.

They are already more impressive on this front than MacMillans were back when. I did not find these helpful at all. I was rejected for counselling by their services when I was going through it, because I had needed counselling to do with other matters in the past, by which I think they meant the attack back in 2010. That's not what I wanted, but I get that they wanted to be absolutely sure the counselling would be based exclusively around the cancer, understandable really; you don't want people taking up space created for one kind of trauma and filling it with another. There are only so many resources.

Nevertheless, it was badly done. Some cold crisp voice asking you down the phone if you have considered suicide when you are trying to get your head around a breast cancer diagnosis is unhelpful to say the least. Then they rejected my application and it felt personal though it wasn't. It's just that in that space everything feels personal.

It's insane that among the potential issues around my cancer counselling might be MacMillan's response to my request for cancer counselling! And it shouldn't get in the way, but it does. There are many cancer charities to whom I can donate but I just can't bring myself to go anywhere near MacMillan.

Things are getting better all the time, I know it to be true. I just don't always feel it to be true.

The crabapple tree continues to flourish, cheering me up every Spring.



It's covered in greenfly so I invested in some ladybirds; freaks me out to see how few insects are around. It's been a long wet winter, maybe everything is delayed, but still it feels like there should be more than this.

We visited Outlander country, that is to say Culross, a well preserved 17th/18th century burgh made famous as the village of Cranesmuir. I've never watched Outlander, perhaps I should. Culross has some strangeness of its own. Up at the old kirk remains the legend that deep in the tunnel/(s) beneath awaits a man. Sometimes he is sitting on a golden chair, sometimes he stands, but always, if you find him, he'll give you a gift. Culross Abbey was first founded in the 1200s, kept by Cistercian monks, but  it is said that this was once the site of a pictish holy place. The village is very photogenic, and there's a warm welcome at the Red Lion Inn. But I am too tired to wrestle with lots of photos so I'll just put up the one I like most, an interior of Sir George Bruce's house, with its decorated wood panels and curved ceilings.



Blackness castle serves as Fort William in the series. It was an interesting contrast to everything else we had seen, the textbook beauty of Blair Atholl, the olde worlde charm of Culross. This was Scottish castle as fortress and prison, for all its noble beginnings. It is empty and grim but still fascinating, as well as having paintworthy views towards the bridges over the Forth.



Back to the zombie apocalypse, you could do a lot worse than lure them into Blackness castle through the front, into your central courtyard then pop 'em off via the walls/that clever caponier/ murder holes etc. Of course, you'd need to keep the sea clear, not necessarily easy with the little pier and the potential of gas filled undead floating to the surface.

Why consider the zombie apocalypse at all? Sometimes I think it's damn close by. We know the slaps as well as the bennies of social media, but when I consider the current numbers of people who seem to be disappointed that the new head of the Catholic Church is, in fact, a Catholic, I honestly wonder. Were they expecting Penn Jillette?

There's a clove of garlic sitting in a corner of the downstairs loo. I haven't the faintest idea how it got there. Was it the work of some intrepid mouse? This prospect doesn't dismay me, let's face it if you're up for braving 3 old mad predators plus attendant humans in your search for condiments, all I've got is admiration. But why leave it?

Vets keeping her in over night, done an abdominal scan, found an area of 'change' on the liver. Could be a tumour, could be a benign growth that's getting in the way, could be an abscess...

To get the exact scan that shows exactly what it is, even before treatment we are looking at £6,000, and then at least one surgery requiring general anaesthetic which may kill her anyway, as may the medicine they are now giving her if it reacts with the liver.

She's 17.