Trump

Passing the time of day with a proprietress of a café while paying the bill yesterday, remarks turned to Trump, the event of our day here in the UK. I said how scary it was that half the voters in the US thought that he was a good thing. She said how refreshing it was to have a politician that spoke his mind, rather than being tied up in knots of political correctness. We settled for the line that speaking one's mind was good, but having a mind fit to be spoken was good too.

I thought afterwards that I had been a bit feeble. As a café proprietress - and I think she was good at her work - she must have known how to keep a grip on her tongue as she would not make a very good living if she were to tell many of her customers what she thought of them. How their hair-dos were terrible, their clothes were terrible, they didn't know how to control their children and that their conversation was straight out of some bog-standard council estate. Otherwise a few blocks of social housing run by a housing association.

Maybe that is exactly why she found mind speaking so refreshing, exactly because she had to spend all her day not doing that.

Thinking some more, I thought that there are variations here. People from up north are said to speak their minds, to be blunt in a way that us southerners are not. The same is said of people from Scandinavia. Some proprietors of cafés in New York were famously rude to their customers and their businesses seemed to thrive on it.

Some people bang on about the need to be honest with each other. Which all too often seems to mean that I can say what I think about you, but I will be very hurt, upset and cross if you say what you think about me.

While Russians, at least in nineteenth century novels, seem to be able to say terrible things to each other one day, then kiss and make up in a very slobbery way the next day. And they think us cold for not going in for such antics, preferring to practice a very English restraint.

At which point I decided that it was all too complicated and fell asleep boxing the compass, a new game which I play when I tire of the animal game (of reference 1). So far, boxing the compass requires me to concentrate and take it fairly slowly; the sixteen by-points do not yet come smoothly, are all to apt to come out the wrong way round.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/03/more-animal-game.html.