Monday
At last! Someone is doing something about the scourge of – *checks notes* – allotments. Wait, what? Oh. Angela Rayner has been criticised for rules allowing councils to sell off allotments to raise money to meet day-to-day expenditures.
This – if you will forgive the lapse into technical jargon for a moment – is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I feel quite strongly about this because there were (and still at the time of writing are) allotments at the end of my parents’ road and they were how my dad first introduced me, in his customarily gentle way, to politics at the age of four or five. Who owned all the little gardens, I asked. The council did, he said, but it let people – often those who didn’t have gardens of their own – rent them pretty cheaply and they could grow whatever they wanted. Then when they got bored or moved away, another person had a turn. This seemed to me exemplary sharing, of exactly the kind preached at this new thing I was trying out called primary school. I approved.
I still approve. Allotments are basically libraries for outdoor people. And, like libraries, if you sell them off, they won’t come back. Do you know how far away we exist now from a time and culture that would re-establish such grace notes to national life? Further than we’ve ever been. So if I were the deputy leader of a party supposedly (I think I read this somewhere) on the side of ordinary people – people without gardens, you might loosely say – do you know what I would do? Almost anything but sell their land from under them.
Tuesday
You know the trolley problem? Not the supermarket one, the philosophical one; a runaway train is heading for five people tied to a railway track, if you pull a lever you divert it to a track on which only one person will be killed – do you pull the lever? You do? OK. What if the single person was a brilliant surgeon and the five were murderers? Or, there are five people’s lives who could be saved by killing another and distributing his organs among them. Do you do that? Why not? And so on.
Now it’s a video game. How? How? Ever since I first heard it, the trolley problem has been one of the things that can keep me up at night. It’s horrible. It’s genius. It’s appalling. It gets under your brain skin and never leaves. How people can want to see it in 3D and play through it in near-infinite varieties I simply cannot imagine. Do they have nerves of steel? Were people right to condemn video games…
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