Mr Johnson has been Up North, doing some campaigning in Bury. News footage shows him repainting white lines on the football pitch there. He does like to be seen doing practical stuff: painting white lines, driving a tram, all sorts of occupations that I’m pretty sure he would not want to do on a regular, full-time basis. Maybe he suffers from Marie Antoinette syndrome.
In an article on occasions in the past when female MPs have had to deal with sexism in the House of Commons, I came across this:
“Baroness, whatever it is … ’
Boris Johnson, as foreign secretary, was slapped down in 2018 for referring to his shadow counterpart, Emily Thornberry, by her husband’s title rather than her name. Answering Thornberry, whose high court judge husband is a knight, Johnson referred to her as “Baroness, whatever it is, I cannot remember what it is … Nugee”.
The then Commons Speaker, John Bercow, said: “We do not address people by the title of their spouses. The shadow foreign secretary has a name, and it is not ‘Lady something’. We know what her name is. It is inappropriate and frankly sexist to speak in those terms, and I am not having it in this chamber.” Johnson subsequently apologised for his “inadvertent sexism”.
It seems to me that has always had to apologise for stuff he has done “inadvertently”. How do we come to have such a bumbling person who does things without realising it as Prime Minister?
Even when apologising for offence he gave inadvertently, he seems to enjoy the limelight. A very modern prime minister therefore, he is a product of this age of being seen to do things, being famous for fifteen minutes.
And so we have Twitter being sold for $44bn - how is a social media platform worth so much? - and influencers earning silly amounts of money just for appearing on social media. No wonder prime ministers want to be seen pushing line painters around on football pitches!
There’s a news item I found about a YouTuber (that’s a YouTuber, not a citizen, not a man, not a bloke with a plane - he is defined as a YouTuber!) who has lost his pilot license in the USA for deliberately crashing his light aircraft so he could film the whole event, as he parachuted to safety, and then upload the video onto YouTube. 2.2m views and no more plane and no more flying for a year. Does he receive financial compensation somehow for the (deliberate) loss of his plane? Or does he just have more money than sense.
How odd to live your life so much in the public eye! I would think that Johnny Depp is wishing he didn’t love so much in he public eye at the moment. It’s a fickle thing, that public eye! One day you are everyone’s darling and the next you are a villain. And your love life is scrutinised - the latest I’ve seen is Bennifer, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, reunited 19 years after their original planned wedding was kiboshed by too much media attention! Oh boy! It’s hard being famous!
On the romance front, here is a new term: Fictosexuals. It means people who fall in love with a fictional characters, whether from books or films or TV series, I think. I”m pretty sure this used to called “having a crush on somebody, as when so many women apparently went a bit wild about Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in the BBC’s production of Pride and Prejudice. What do you call someone who falls in love with the actor who plays a fictional character? Is there a separate special label for such people.
I know that characters in books become very real. It’s why series of books featuring the dame characters do so well. It’s why I like to reread certain books, to revisit those characters. In some cases, the best cases, you can imagine them carrying on beyond the end of the novel. But most of us don’t fall in love with fictional characters. As a rule we known they don’t really exist beyond the pages. But there is apparently someone in Japan, Akihiko Kondo, who has married Hatsune Miku, a fictional computer-synthesised pop singer who has been on tour with Lady Gaga. He has been in a “relationship” with her for ten hears apparently and says this saved him from depression. However, none of his family turned up to his wedding. That’s a bit sad!
Such is the weird modern world!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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