I arrived in Chamonix a few days ago. The first night I arrived I checked that gay meeting app and left a message for a mysterious man on-line. You know, most messages go unanswered, liaisons cancelled at the last moment, people are not who they say they are. Surprisingly I met the man without any complications. He looked like the pictures he sent, he turned up where we had agreed and he stayed close the four days until he left. He held my hand. He kissed me. He gazed into my eyes with an affection I thought I would never again experience. Now he’s gone. We speak all day, every day. I don’t think I have ever sent so many heart emojis.
I’m staying with a very old friend in the chalet she designed and built in the heart of Chamonix, the various mountains with all their unusual names tower over us. Yesterday we drove through the valley toward Switzerland, parked up, took a gondola and a chair lift to a wide open pasture where in the winter thousands of skiers hurtle through the snowy landscape. We were aiming for a refuge where we would stay the night but we went the wrong way… walking an hour or so in the wrong direction. By the time we arrived at the refuge my legs ached and the big toe I broke years ago… felt like it was dropping off.
However, I loved the refuge, we sat on deckchairs and looked out into the inky black universe above us and the lights of Chamonix below us. As I ate the delicious dinner they served us and played card games with my friend and her daughter I couldn’t help thinking about the starving people of Gaza, all of us under the same sky. I was angry thinking about our white western governments and how corrupt they are and how much I detest our Zionist leader Starmer. How I loathe the way our democracy has been sold to Israel.
As I tried to sleep on the hard bunk in our open dorm I fretted over my powerlessness. There is nothing we can do to make a difference to help those poor people. Those children desperate for food, shot in the head as soon as they are handed their meagre rations.
This weekend hundreds of people will stand up for our democracy in London. Ready to be arrested for holding a sign. Our despicable government. How did we get here? When did I understand the lengths the establishment will go to get its own way? It started with Corbyn being smeared with anti semitism when he won the Labour leadership. Pictures of our military target practicing on his face? It became worse when he forced a hung parliament and Theresa May into an unholy alliance with the Ulster Unionists. Corbyn nearly won that election, the establishment lost their shit and evil Labour MP’s like Lisa Nandy threatened to break Corbyn as a man… the same rhetoric the Israelis use to describe what they are doing to the Palestinians.
Our government is not our own. Starmer is running our country for the zionists and the 1%. Selling off more publicly owned assets to assuage the greed of the 1%, defending the companies the 1% already own who are presently stealing from every man and woman in the country. Poisoning our rivers and seas, stealing our private information and selling it to the highest bidder, letting evil companies like Palentir prepare us for the same violent treatment presently meted out to the innocent, unarmed Palestinians. Mark my words, what you are witnessing in Palestine… Starmer and Nandy, with no hesitation, will do to us.
I was dressed very inappropriately for a mountain walk. I don’t have any mountain gear. I don’t have boots or lycra or a padded gillet. I do have a thick Walter van Beirendonck sweater and an Etro cashmere scarf and wide denim jeans. Although sartorially shocking to fellow alpinists I was perfectly happy.
Anything else to report? Not really. I drank my first Negroni last night… which was rather good. I speak to fellows from the RCA. Apparently the beastly Jordan Baseman is behaving impeccably and let’s hope my blog and the complaints of others will cause him to reflect and think twice before he treats students next year like he treated some of us.