Monday 19 June 2017

New watercolour

Got a little distracted by the election and didn’t paint anything at all. Finally got back into it on Friday night. This took 6 ½ hours from start to finish. It’s Harry, my former clarinet teacher. 


Meanwhile, here’s a piece I wrote on the same day for the British Boxers website.  It’s about the upcoming Mayweather-McGregor fiasco. 

I’m not buying it and nor should you


Tuesday 6 June 2017

I see you Theresa May


I see you Theresa May. I see your cold dead eyes, those prematurely aged windows to your bloodless soul. I see the way you stand, your body language, your awkward gait. Your back hunched over with the weight of the lies that you carry.

I hear you Theresa May. I hear the words that leave your lips but tell us nothing. The barely concealed tremble, the disdain in your voice when you lecture one of the desperate about the missing ‘money tree’; the money tree that isn’t there for the nurses forced to feed from food banks. The money tree that mysteriously reappears when it comes to you and your own. They get one percent of nothing. You get ten percent of everything.I watch you Theresa May. I watch as you hold the hand of a monster and a monster holds the hand of you. Two monsters together. A match made in hell. I watch you say nothing as he sets the world on fire and condemns our children and their children to eternal misery. But then that wouldn’t concern you would it? Your frozen soul has no idea of what it is like to bring a child into the world; of the love that is sure to overwhelm you. Nothing so prosaic as children to suck on your withered teats, Theresa May, not when the intoxicating scent of power fills your head.

I grimace. I groan. I hold my head in my hands and want to cry. I see you sitting together on that couch. You and him. Fake smiles painted on your fake lips. ‘I thought: ‘what a lovely girl’,’ he tells us of your first meeting. ‘I fancied her straight away!’ Even when you try to stage manage you cannot hide the lies. You cheerlessly tell us about your ‘boys and girls jobs’. He takes out the bins and rakes in millions from the global investment company that he works for (never once getting any insider information from his wife). You refuse to put his dinner on the table because you’re too busy selling guns to terrorists.

Ah yes, those guns. Those guns. You little gun runner, you. ‘It keeps people on the streets of Britain safe,’ you tell us. Yes of course it does Theresa May. Of course I made sense in Manchester and fortnight ago and in London last weekend. Of course it makes perfect sense to sell guns to Saudi Arabia. Of course it makes sense to make money from the misery of others. The atrocities in Yemen, the dead mothers, the dead children. Do you smell their blood Theresa May? Do you hear their screams? And do you hear the cries of your own people as your actions are paid for in horror and tragedy? Are the billions that you make from your evil trade really worth the thousands of lives that will never be lived?

I see you Theresa May. I see the corporate Britain that you try to engineer. Not so much a country as a company. GB PLC. A Britain bereft of love and compassion, in which people are relegated to mere workers overseen by a rich elite masquerading as their bosses. A Britain in which the working classes are a disposable commodity like chickens in a battery farm. In which the old are tossed aside, their possessions stolen from them and their children left with no hope. A Britain in which the poor are left to starve on the streets; in which the weak and disabled are stubbed out like spent cigarette butts. A Britain that belongs to everybody but Britain: electricity sold to the Chinese to sell back to your minions at a vast profit; gas, water, trains, schools and finally the welfare state, the eternal gift that Bevan bestowed upon us, dismantled and sold to the highest bigger. A Britain bled dry for the privileged few.

I hear your lies Theresa May. I hear them every time you open your dry lips. You want to stay because ‘it’s the best for our country’. Then you want to go because ‘it’s the best for our country.’ But it benefits nobody but you Theresa May. Nobody but you and your insatiable pursuit of power. Didn’t hubby helpfully tell us about how you had plotted and schemed for years to achieve your ugly ambitions? (Didn’t hubby suffer for his loose mouth when he got home :))

You’re a coward Theresa May. I smell your cowardice. You’re a coward because even you cannot defend the indefensible. You refuse to meet your main rival face to face and instead send an underling. An underling whose father died only three days earlier. An underling on whose shoulders you lay the blame after she takes the blows that were meant for you. A coward Theresa May: if this is how you treat a friend and colleague what chance the rest of us?

You see yourself as Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher. And that, Theresa May, is the biggest crime of all. You’re the new Iron Lady ready to take your revenge on everybody who is not you. You see yourself as Margaret Thatcher but I see you for what you are.

I see you Theresa May. And others will too. I pray it is not too late before they do.