Terry Prone: Game of cat and mouse amid political firings, anti-Semitism, and middle aisle closures
The planned afternoon with Maura and Daithi was interrupted by a mouse rescue operation.
Doing Sunday lunch, I realise I’ve been in denial about courgettes. Courgettes are a complete waste of time. No matter what you do to them, they end up like boiled make-up sponges.
All lined up, made up, sound-checked and watching the video feed of RTÉ’s Today Show, ready to join Maura and Daithi from my sitting room, I hear the distinctive bellowing of a cat with a victim.
I leave the chair to exercise my ultimate lockdown-learned skill: mouse rescue. It works like this. You grab a Pyrex mixing bowl and one of those firm sheets you put in an oven to catch drips. Then you assess the mouse. If it’s lashing around, you try to save it. (It would be cruel to save a moribund mouse.)
In this case, the mouse is doing impressive sprints, so I wait until the two cats have it cornered, scream at and kick at them so they retreat, huffy and mystified, and get the mouse trapped beneath the clear glass globe.
Next step is to slide the oven sheet beneath the mouse and bowl, carefully lift the lot, open the door to the garden with an elbow and decant the mouse into a flower bed, yelling at it to stop sitting there like an eejit reflecting on life the universe and everything, because if one of the cats gets it a second time, it needn’t rely on me.
I’m all good-deeded out. Then I fling the bowl and oven sheet into the dishwasher and rush back to my seat as the countdown begins. I think Maura and Daithi are kind of taken aback by my phenomenal verve. Nothing like the adrenalin rush of mouse-saving against a deadline.
You’re supposed to find the great thoughts that sum up your life in books by Marcus Aurelius and such like, but how about this from thriller by Gregg Hurwitz: “They say exercising can add seven years onto the end of your life. But I figure those seven years are about what you get if you add up all the hours you’d spend sweating your sorry ass on a treadmill. So I figure, why not skip all that misery, live out the good days, and hit the dirt when it’s time?”
A comfort factor in the last lockdown was the middle aisle in Lidl and Aldi. Government has decided, in the interest of fairness, to close down the middle aisle, upset people like me, and drive business right into the arms of Jeff Bezos.
Big day for political firings. Three of Sinn Féin’s in the North have been told not to let the door hit them on the posterior as they depart because they got €10,000 in a Covid payment and didn’t immediately put their hands up, say “this isn’t for me, to whom do I return it?”
You have to sympathise.
Which of us, finding our overdraft wiped out by an inexplicable generosity on the part of the State, would become sententious about the rights and wrongs of the issue?
Three of them are gone, anyway, and not just to the sin bin. Gone to the cancellation bin. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the former leader of the UK’s Labour Party also got the bullet from his party today.
Because a dear friend knows and values Corbyn, I have been on the hunt, over several years, for evidence to find him worthy. I failed. Another friend — who also knows Corbyn up close — differs from the first, holding that “Jeremy is self-righteous, obstinate and listens only to himself”.
Corbyn’s also responsible for failure to halt anti-Semitism within Labour which coincided to an astonishing extent with his years at the top of that party.
The probe that nailed him wasn’t an internal investigation, set up by Keir Starmer to put a new stamp on British Labour, which he now leads, having succeeded Corbyn.
The body that looked into Labour and found its culture tolerant of anti-semitism was the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. They’re independent of the warring sides within Labour. More to the point, their recommendations carry the weight of law.
It might be said that the EHRC’s examination of anti Semitism in Labour is somewhat overdue, since one Jewish MP had to have a police escort in order to attend the 2018 Labour Party conference, and the deputy leader of the party at the time later stated that the MP had been "bullied out of her own party by racist thugs".
That said, its eventual and lengthy report nailed the party for leadership interference in earlier, internal probes, and for a rake of other manifestations of one of the oldest prejudices in history. All on Corbyn’s watch.
In any area of public offence, it’s worth pausing to ask one question before joining the lads dragging the electronic pallets, preparatory for public immolation of an individual.
Just one question: “Was this the only example of this behaviour?”
When committing a single act of wrongdoing, the offender may have been drunk, dreadfully ill, meeting a deadline, caring for a sick child, distracted by a rabid dog or ignorant of the significance of what they wrote/said.
That makes what they did wrong.
On its own, Corbyn's preface to a book containing anti-Semitic content could be excused as the action of a man too busy to read what he was validating.
On its own, his defending a mural of classic anti-Semitic caricatures could be excused for the same reason.
On its own, attending a ceremony to honour one of the men responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics…but enough. The pattern is clear and the remorse non-existent, as evidenced by his refusal to accept the judgment of the EHRC which, encapsulated in a statement, caused his suspension from the party he once led.
Early in the week, the postman delivered a weighty package. A gift from a friend, it was an ornate leather bound book, all fleurs de lis, crossed swords and 1,065 gilt-edged pages. The Count of Monte Cristo. I started it on Monday, finished it today and while you have to have reservations about stuff like the hero having a couple of slaves, this is one hell of a read.
On Newstalk, Mark Cagney tells his audience I give great hugs. I’m honoured he can remember them. It’s been so long, I can’t.
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