by Ninety-five per cent of last year’s money, one hundred per cent of this year’s opinions, and a radiator that knocks in sympathy.
LONDON, England (The London Prat) – Today’s entry is a list, because the day was a list, and because a list is the only form of prose that does not ask you to pretend you were in control.
Grievances, in order of arrival
- The radiator under my window knocked at a quarter to seven, in groups of three, like a visitor who has been told nobody is in.
- The neighbour on the ground floor, a man called Dennis, has once again put out the recycling in the wrong week and then stood guard over it as though it were a small, disappointing monument.
- The library has emailed to say a book I reserved is available and that it will be held for me until I fail to collect it.
- The cursor on my screen has blinked at the same sentence for forty minutes. It has more patience than I have, and less to say.
- The tea tin contains, at best, an optimistic quantity of dust.
- And the Northern Ireland Executive has no budget for the year, which I am assured is a problem for Belfast and which I have nonetheless been brooding on since lunch.
The desk and the sentence
I am working on a chapter in which a widow in a seaside boarding house receives a letter and decides not to open it for nine pages. This is a well-worn technique. The great novelists of the early twentieth century could make an unopened envelope feel like a whole constitutional crisis, and I have spent the morning trying to do it with a smaller envelope and a worse chair.
Progress: two sentences, one deleted. The deleted one was the better of the two. This is the way of things.
The budget that has not happened
Around noon I gave up and read the news from Belfast. According to the UTV report on the Stormont budget impasse, the Finance Minister, John O’Dowd, says the Executive cannot set a budget without a better offer from the UK Government. He had just spoken, by video link, to the Northern Ireland Secretary, Sir Chris Bryant, who has described the offer as final and has criticised what he called irresponsible overspending by devolved ministers.
The offer is slightly more than 1.5 billion pounds over three years. I mention the figure with care, because the headline above the article, as I read it, says 15 billion and the body says one and a half. I have written novels with a looser grip on arithmetic, but I did not publish them, and nobody asked me to run a health service on them.
The detail I cannot put down is this. Departments have had no budget for the financial year since it began. They may spend up to 95 per cent of last year’s funding. That is, in effect, a household in which everyone is told to carry on as before, minus a small and unspecified amount, until somebody else has finished a meeting. O’Dowd says he is exploring all options to pay for pay rises for teachers and health workers, and ministers are due to meet Sir Chris again.
I do not think anyone in this story is stupid. I think the structure is. A structure which requires several parties to agree before anything can happen is a sentence with too many clauses, and I know about those. The political correspondent John Manley headlined a recent column to the effect that Stormont once again excels with hostility but fails on meaningful outcomes, and the Irish News column on Stormont’s hostility reports a chamber session in which about forty minutes went on one set of questions, with no legislation to show for it. I would like to have been able to write that chapter. It is a perfect unopened envelope.
Afternoon: the reading group
The reading group meets on the first floor of a bookshop run by a gentle, bearded man called Mr Pettifer, who sells books on the principle that every customer is an old friend who has not yet turned up. We were discussing a novel of manners from the Edwardian years, in which a family inherits a house and spends two hundred pages being polite about the plumbing.
It became an argument, as it does, about who had brought the biscuits. Hester had brought ginger nuts. Margaret said she had not been informed about ginger nuts. Hester said that nobody is informed about biscuits; they are simply either present or absent. We settled it by dividing the packet into ninety-five per cent portions, in honour of the news, and leaving the remainder on the table for a future round of negotiation. Nobody has touched it. It is, I think, a model of the Executive.
Evening: cows before land
At the end of the day I did what I always do at the end of a day that has defeated me, and read a farming site. It carried a headline about Wyoming ranchers buying the cows first and the land later. I did not read further, because I felt I understood. If you start spending before the ground has been settled, you find yourself with an excellent herd and nowhere to stand it. I recommend this principle to anyone who wishes to understand Stormont in the autumn.
It is much the same as trying to write a chapter before you have decided where the widow lives. If you want to see how the editors at Bohiney handle the question of where the cows are meant to go, I wish you luck. And for the difference between reporting and commentary, which I keep having to explain to Dennis, I recommend what commentary is and what it is not.
The radiator has stopped knocking. I do not trust it. Tomorrow I will open the envelope on page nine, if only to see whether anyone has a budget. There are more of my daily notes at The London Prat, and a fair number of them are about waiting for a letter. Anyone wanting the capital’s wider mood can try the London news pages, which deal with the Executive far less gently than I have.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
