My ever industrious and indefatigable wife and myself made our annual assault on the hedges around our front garden starting yesterday and on into today which left in available time for diaries. After two days of sweaty, unremitting toil on a warm sunny summer’s springtime day we were left fit for nothing and the remainder of today will be reserved for the 6 restorative R’s, rest, relaxation, ruminating, riting, reading and ‘rt.
So here we are arrived here at the fourth restorative, ‘riting, to report on the third, the ruminating.
In nature evolution has secured for each adaptable species willing to take on its own niche a form of security in the lack of that adaptability in others. It works well by and large as long as each species sticks to the niche for which it is adapted. When survival depends on a species encroaching on the niche of others fights inevitably break out and winners and losers result. Disruption, sometimes violent disruption, occurs until a new order is established and species which could not adapt have become extinct.
I can see this at work in the garden from my vantage point where the first two stages, rest and relaxation are conducted, namely my heavy victorian chair by the french doors. Birds jostle for position on the highest branches overhead, hold their fort for a while and are replaced in their turn by the bigger species or the more nimble. There is constant rotation. At ground level live the scurriers, Dunnocks scratch about in the dirt below the bird feeders over their heads scared to venture to those heights and content with the debris raining down with the compliments of other avian species happy to hang precariously from a feeder.
On the feeder the daily battle is going on with the more nervous species making way for the garrulous who seem to stick to a timetable for feeding letting other species fit in their turn in a less intimidating atmosphere.
Some species are happy to feed together but this is rare. Everyone knows their place.
Up at the next strata birds flit and flash in the bushes going about their routines and yet others occupy the niche above and come to earth only on the football pitch in the playing field opposite, a long way from humans where they feed contentedly down the half way line or behind the goalposts.
How nature works has always fascinated me. Looking behind that immediate activity before the eyes there is hierarchy, tribalism, conflict, power, strength, domination and character not just a feathered, breeding, skittish, collection of wild hungry winged animals.
This interest is useful in other areas, for example many, if not most, see the Cummings controversy as an error of judgement and a sackable failing by saying one thing and doing another thereby pissing off those who have done as told and stayed at home regardless of the personal cost. Of course this is true. But understanding both the players, the niches they occupy and survival instincts kicking in on the front line of politics I see this as an opening gambit on the far right of UK politics to at least avoid a no-deal Brexit, possibly Brexit altogether, by cutting off the source of Johnson’s power, Cummings, and neutering Johnson.
Johnson is a mere figurehead and not a fit leader but his job after all was to win an election not lead the country. Cummings job is to drive a Brexit no-deal over the line not to advise Johnson but to get us out of Europe regardless of all else in spite of Johnson. Authority to sack Cummings is not in Johnson’s contract and Cummings will survive in position irrespective because all else besides exiting the EU on a no-deal basis (and in the process losing as many UK lives as it takes) is of no interest to their maniac, ideologically driven alt-right sponsers. These shadowy, secretive vultures sat on the margins of politics euphemistically called influencers are just waiting for those with bit parts to do their stuff and shuffle off.
Cummings and Johnson will be shuffled off in their good time alone unless another species after their niche can play a more adaptive game. Cummings is the opening move in a game being played in the tree tops way above our heads.
In my humble parlour, from my victorian chair I shall watch their strategy with interest. I think that more against Cummings will emerge this week or next, fires will be stoked, an enraged public will be brought to the boil, the privileged classes will be rightly vilified, one rule for them one for us, populism will be wound back and the Cummings goose will be cooked.
The game is on.
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