For a time as a child I had a couple of white mice housed in a beer crate turned on it´s side (we lived in a pub) and fitted with two panes of glass to easily let me see what was going on. I wonder whether the person who thought up ’Big Brother’ also had pet mice as a child? Experience has taught me the benefits of focus so I won´t allow myself to be diverted by going down that road tittilating as it might be.
Apart from the usual receptacles for water and food, I had installed a small Hamster wheel designed to allow the inhabitants of my converted beer crate some exercise. I am firmly convinced that my little white friends saw not the benefits of exercise and I must conclude that the wild running in the wheel is most likely to be contributed to the effort on their part to imagining they were going somewhere e.g. leaving or as one might put it today, doing a Brexit.
From an exercise point of view it was of course a successful ruse, from a mental health angle, I´m not so sure. More than half a century has passed since then and had I been able to see into the future I would certainly have named my master of the house mouse, Boris.
Like my furry friend PM Johnson has been frantically running in his own personal Hamster wheel and getting absolutely nowhere with the world looking on in amazement.
Since the electorate left the country holding the Brexit baby, conceived after NHS sweet, we hold all the cards talk and a malfunctioning advisory condom, the country has been in turmoil. Two Prime Ministers, two elections, a couple of opposition party leaders later and Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is now in charge and reminiscent of my white mice, not getting anywhere. The promise of an ”oven ready” deal guaranteeing an orderly Brexit bestowed on him a much sought after premiership and an 80 seat majority in the House of Commons at the last election.
Brexit with a side order of Corona is the kind of stuff that requires politicians with the mettle of Churchill. The same stuff however is in the process of breaking the man who would so much like to be a new Churchill but is sadly lacking in most of what is required. Nobody knows what the outcome at the end of the transition period will be for the UK but anybody with a bit of sense realizes that it is a choice between economic devastation and humble pie. The lesser of the one brings on more of the other. No 80 seat majority in the House of Commons will change that.
I can’t remember the names of my two mice but I do remember that one morning I looked into the crate to see a large number of tiny pink baby mice. Obviously my master of the house mouse had found time off from his important business in the Hamster wheel. Eventually my mother insisted I evict my room companions, crate and all. She couldn´t stand the smell any longer.