Interruption of Normal Service - an explanation

I must apologise to regular readers for the drought of postings here. The truth is that I have been busy with several other matters, and that after so much intense, dense politics I feel almost drained (I have been engaging in daily combat on Twitter on the Labour leadership and the miserable Bad Losers campaign to undo the referendum and to lie about its consequences, but my immediate thoughts can be found on my feed there @ClarkeMicah).

 

I have a great difficulty in choosing any stance on the Tory leadership save one of contempt for the mess they have all made of it. What should I care which of these Blairites takes the helm? Can any be relied on to regain our independence or (just as vitally) make good use of it once they have it? 

 

I should also point out that I have no special sources of inside information about these developments for fairly obvious reasons. 

 

And I am a bit distressed by my inability to do justice to the commemoration of the catastrophe of the Somme, 100 years ago today. My general thoughts on this horror are well summed up here, in an article I commend to new and old readers.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2012/11/covenant-with-death.html

 

The book I refer to, I'm delighted to say,  is back in print and everyone should buy and read it. 

 

My fury at the waste (and it was a waste) of the Flower of the Nation on that day is undimmed and grows with time. I wish all these commemorations were harsher on the folly of the 1914 war, and that there would be more consideration of the real alternative which we could have followed by staying out of a Franco-Russian war against Germany in which we had no interest.

 

As I watched the Thiepval ceremony, I made a connection I had never made before. This glorious plangent piece of music, 'The Banks of Green Willow'

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Q9dz1kse8

 

was played. I had never realised its composer, George Butterworth (who liked to set A.E.Housman to music as well) had died at the Somme. 

 

It breaks the heart to think of the country in which this was written, the men and women who lived there, the landscape, the ideas, the habits of mind and the lives they knew, which have all now perished from the earth and which we can only make vague efforts to recreate in our minds.