I Digress

Hello Dear Reader

Since we last convened in your inbox, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom unexpectedly called a general election, inspiring his French counterpart to suddenly do the same, and England lost to Iceland in the football again in a manner eerily reminiscent of those Halcyon days of 2016 immediately following the Carnival of Brexit. One never imagined there would come a time where one might feel nostalgic for June 2016, but that time has arrived, folks.

Seeing Theresa May in the baking aisle at my local supermarket the other day, my bottom lip started to tremble. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all. She didn’t have any kids she’d lost count of, her only vice was wheat fields and she likes baking. (Also sausages according to my husband, who saw her choosing some once in the same supermarket. He could not say if they were Merguez or Lincolnshire and I still need to know. What if everything might have been different, what if we breached the gossamer thread separating us from the parallel universe where Rylan is PM and Judge Rinder the Minister for Why We Can All Have Nice Things All The Time, had Mrs May just gone for the Cumberlands?)

How we have lowered the bar for public office in recent years. Fuck a pig, inherit the earth, throw it away and then return, this time be-knighted. Or: be a Republican and accept Queen’s Counsel and a knighthood while banging on about your working class credentials. Did you know my Dad wasn’t a toolmaker, by the way?

Poor us. We are all Hobson in this matter.

Meanwhile, the British Media are collectively losing their minds. A cursory glance at today’s Daily Mail has one columnist writing that Camilla is the new Diana, while in another article, Donna Air has decided that what the Great British Public really need to know today, is that when she was in Byker Grove she did a ouija board and conjured Beelzebub. That might just be the most insightful piece of investigative journalism in the modern age because if Ant and Dec were there with our Donna, then their hitherto unexplained careers finally make sense.

I don’t know what the other more reputable news sites might be losing their minds about today. There is no point in looking, they’re all the same, just wearing different coats of outrage, and as I said, the bar for everything is so low now, I have fully surrendered. I am not ashamed. As a middle aged mum in the Home Counties, my thrills are few and far between friends, and are now confined to enjoying the online shudders of more high minded acquaintances should one dare share a link from sources they consider de trop. Nothing is more amusing than those people who use Facebook on Microsoft Windows to lecture us all on not using Amazon.

Enough of my griping. What we all need now are, in the words of the immortal Ian Dury, reasons to be cheerful. And so, in the spirit of community service, I have compiled a list of things to look forward to over coming months. (One hesitates to call it summer when some of us still have the heating on and went to bed with a hot water bottle last night.)

• If, like my sister, you are a rabid Jane Austen fan, then you might enjoy the Jane Austen Regency Week which takes place over ten days at the end of June. You don’t even have to like Jane Austen (you are my tribe) but the frocks are quite nice aren’t they, and who doesn’t like tea and cakes and gossip?

• Edinburgh’s always having festivals - do those people do anything else apart from party? - but if you want to swerve the madness of the August one, they have a jazz and blues one, and who doesn’t like jazz and blues apart from one of my ex-boyfriends which is why he is an ex.

• If you, like me, are a tightarse and refuse to shell out for the Chelsea Flower Show to be squeezed in like a sardine with too many people wearing coloured chinos and gilets, then the RHS Flower Show at Tatton Park promises to be rather lovely.

• I have an album to finish and a book to write, which is why I can’t be gallivanting around the nation on a leisure adventure, but one thing I have got tickets for and am very excited to go to is the London Gay Men’s Chorus Queer Carnival at Alexandra Palace. Some of us are old enough to remember when the LGMC first began in the early 90s as a little ray of light during a very bleak time. What a joy to see it still going strong over three decades later, and bigger and better than ever.

• One of the many curious pleasures of having children is that you often have to pretend to like things you aren’t remotely interested in because they love them. As such, I am now a reluctant expert on the various RAF bases of the nation. If you too have to pretend to be interested in this kind of thing, or you are actually interested in this kind of thing, then Wales has an airshow this summer, correction, this July. A month that in the olden days was summer but is now just the seventh month of the year, a year where the temperature never goes above 15 degrees Celsius and the skies have settled on a perpetual blue-grey colour.

• A mere two days after the nation will collectively go down a rabbit hole, you can experience it all over again at Alice’s Day in Oxford.

• Yours truly will be in Suffolk for Latitude Festival on July 27th and then hotfooting it across the shires to play a solo set at Jackofest that same evening at the De La War Pavilion.

Finally - and perhaps most importantly given that it is the title of this month’s newsletter - I have news to impart of a show I shall be doing at the start of December. It is not a music gig. I am not sure what it is yet. Part the bits in between songs, part newsletter, part short stories, part road-testing this book I am writing out on you - well, we’ll all find out, won’t we? And here I must apologise because this newsletter is later than planned - because album, not bidding on toy pianos on eBay, that was last week - and the tickets went on sale yesterday and have already almost sold out. It is in a small theatre, in London, and as I write there are only twenty tickets left. However, given this level of demand, we might be able to offer a second date. I must apologise also that yet again I am confining my live exploits to the capital but if it goes well, then in all likelihood I shall bring it to other parts of the United Kingdom.

(If you are one of those weird people who come to my gigs for the actual music and not the bit in between, then fear not because an actual music tour is in the works for next year.)

As ever, I digress. As ever, I send you all my love. United Kingdom and my Gallic cousins in La Belle France, we all have a mad few weeks ahead of us, but stay well, stay strong and stay lucky, and we will be okay.

Much love as ever,

Nerina xxx