Quaint

On a long trip in remote places, you end up listening to a lot of podcasts. One we heard today, driving in rural South Australia, (see pictures below), included Dominic Cummings and Michael Gove having this exchange, in which Gove’s Westminster-bubble-naivety is amusingly punctured by Cummings:

Cummings: The Tories have just moved on in the public mind, to a place even worse than universal loathing and hatred: they're kind of parked in the you're-just-waiting-to-die space. 

Gove: So the public think of them as wheelwrights or thatchers or stained-glass-window-makers; the party's seen as a quaint, irrelevant organization? 

Cummings: No, I wouldn't say quaint; I'd say, if you're going to have a metaphor like that, that it's more like the local vagrant who used to smash everything up, but he's now a cabbage sitting in a wheelchair and not relevant any more. That's the metaphor I would use.

[Photographs show Mount Remarkable in Melrose, South Australia, including the North Star Hotel, "the oldest licensed hotel in thd Flinders Ranges" (it had a very welcome log fire today).]

 

For full podcast, link is here.

The Start of an Adventure

I have been in Fremantle in Western Australia since Friday. It is an architecturally beautiful place and, because somehow each time when I've been here it's been a weekend, I have enjoyed Mass at St Patrick's Basilica all of the several times I've visited. They have a priest whose homilies are full of the kind of tenderness I think the world needs more of and a cantor with a beautiful voice. It is very cheering, no matter where one is in the world, to gather in a sacred space with others who have left their homes to come together in obedience to the obligation to go to Mass. 

The rest of Fremantle, by contrast, on weekend evenings has become, every new time I visit, more and more heaving and frenzied. Twenty years ago I first saw scenes of wild, senseless "partying" in a town in Devon in England - no drinking or eating establishment where music wasn't at such a volume you couldn't have a conversation, packs of young people moving in excited blocks (strangely many of them exclusively girls or exclusively boys). I saw the same thing repeated in Liverpool a year or two later. I assumed it was a very English thing - updated Hogarth.

Now though such scenes have arrived in Australia - or certainly Fremantle. The people involved begin the evening looking excited, go through a feverish stage and in many cases end up very obviously very drunk. Puzzlingly there doesn't seem to be any particular desire to hook up with the opposite sex. The girls in particular seem to have made a lot of effort with hair and glittery make up and very short skirts and very high heels. But not apparently to attract a partner, just to attempt to be queen bee within their own mob of females.

Anyway, such urban scenes will soon be behind us. We are setting off to drive to the Eastern states. Our country is so vast we haven't explored the half of it so this will be all new to us - very exciting.

In the meantime, yesterday, before Mass, I walked down to South Beach, Fremantle. It was beautiful in the autumnal light.