Sophistry and hypocrisy. Perhaps.

Well, there we are. A new Royal Baby. As far as I can tell from the media coverage, absolutely nothing else happened in the world, yesterday. The normal run-of-the-mill events that arise in a global population of over 7 billion souls paused and the world held its collective breath. Or something along those lines.

The main hilarity of the day was looking at Twitter and wondering if you could guess from the various feeds, if you didn’t know already, which of the US and the UK is the monarchy and which the republic. The US feeds were full of awe and wonder, while the UK ones were generally either ignoring the event, or taking the piss. This is entirely as it should be.

I did have a slight tongue-in-cheek (on my part at least) spat with a friend when he grumbled on Farcebørk about yet another useless parasite born to a life on the dole. Well, he’s a republican, so that’s fair enough, but he’s also a socialist, so I had to pick him up about the fact that state hand outs are what it’s all about if you’re a socialist. I suggested that they could, if he preferred, take back the Crown Estate and live off that instead of receiving the reduced amount the government allocates them having abolished the Civil List (which was the pay off for the Crown Estate in the first place).

The response was predictable outrage. “You’d prefer them to live off stolen property instead?”

Well, why not? That’s what we all do in a capitalist society, isn’t it? Certainly if your viewpoint is socialist, all property is theft; all labour is stolen from you by the faceless oppressor. If you own your own house, someone somewhere, even if in the remote past was dispossessed for the freehold to come available, eventually, to you.

And he is English but living in America. I suspect you only have to go back a little over 300 years to find some indigenous tribe that was thrown off the land his house is built on. If they’re lucky, the tribe was relocated to the shittiest place available locally and given enough booze to drink themselves into oblivion. More likely, they were rounded up and shot, or died of starvation because of heroes like Buffalo Bill wiping out their food source.

Be a republican by all means, but don’t blame the Royal Family for living a better socialist lifestyle than you do, with bigger and better state handouts. It’s not fair.

I may or may not mean most of this post, before you go off on one.

Whether the weather...

The real main news of last night, of course, is the fact that we had a huge thunderstorm.

Actually, I think someone else had the huge thunderstorm, we just got the edge of it: a few rumbles of thunder, a few flashes of lightning, some rain. It was good for the garden no doubt, but it was nowhere near heavy or prolonged enough around the Gin Palace to break the humidity. In fact this morning it is far more humid than it was, if a few degrees cooler.

I am not enjoying it at all. I like the sun, but a few degrees cooler and a light breeze would be welcome. I am fed up with feeling washed out, knackered and damp with sweat. I can feel it in my chest when it gets really hot – I just can’t keep cool enough half the time. I am convinced it’s the humidity rather than the heat. If the sweat could dry off, it would cool me down, but no, it’s not to be I guess. Even with the fan blowing, I get some sleep, but wake up feeling stiff and unrested.

Roll on the autumn and the few weeks at the end of the year when the sun/rain/temperature balance is just right.