HERE WE GO AGAIN

Like the old chest­nut it is, Christ­mas is busy re­peat­ing it­self for the umpteenth time: the ads for tur­rons; for per­fumes (to­gether with their quasi-daft names: In­vic­tus, Chloé by Chloé, Good Girl Daz­zling Gar­den [?], Musk Is Great [!!!)]); the sad-look­ing Xmas street dis­plays in every town, city and vil­lage; the toys that look as if they were de­signed by des­per­ately unimag­i­na­tive peo­ple; the home dec­o­ra­tions con­sist­ing mainly of lights swirling around win­dows or Santa Clauses pre­tend­ing to be bur­glars. And so on.

Mean­while, Spain has a new gov­ern­ment thanks to the sup­port of the Basque and Cata­lan pro-in­de­pen­dence par­ties, some­thing which has thrown the right-wing state-wide par­ties into re­cur­rent tantrums, in which they claim that Span­ish democ­racy is dead be­cause the opin­ions of Spain’s mainly right-wing judges have been ig­nored in favour of a po­lit­i­cal so­lu­tion for the thou­sands of peo­ple who were fac­ing mas­sive fines or jail sen­tences or ac­cu­sa­tions of ter­ror­ism for hav­ing turned schools into polling sta­tions for a ref­er­en­dum which was not yet il­le­gal on Oc­to­ber 1st, 2017, or for hav­ing sat down on a mo­tor­way, or for hav­ing in­vaded the air­port in protest against po­lice vi­o­lence and the im­pris­on­ment of half an elected gov­ern­ment. A ref­er­en­dum which the right-wing politi­cians openly – and in­cor­rectly – de­scribe as a coup d’état, while at the same time fifty for­mer mem­bers of the Span­ish mil­i­tary have is­sued a de­mand for a real coup d’état (they, at least, have looked the word up in a dic­tio­nary) to oust prime min­is­ter Pedro Sánchez.

And mean­while, of course, the bombs and bul­lets are rain­ing down on Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan and So­ma­lia and Mali and Yemen and Myan­mar and the DRC and Syria.

Not to for­get the ever in­creas­ing rav­ages of cli­mate change which promise to turn the planet into a me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal bed­lam by 2035. Oh yes, and the price of olive oil has sky­rock­eted.

So, what to do? Well, on the face of it or even the arse of it, not much. We can send money and food to the con­flict zones but we can’t stop the killing.

We can demon­strate against fos­sil fuels and re­cy­cle stuff and fly less and use more pub­lic trans­port (while try­ing to avoid the local RENFE net­work in Cat­alo­nia whose use of the word ‘trans­port’ should be pros­e­cuted under the Cata­lan Trades De­scrip­tion Act, if such a thing ex­isted, which it doesn’t) but if, as the Guardian as­sures us, 1% of the human race gen­er­ates more car­bon emis­sions than 66% of the poor­est, then we can change our travel habits and sep­a­rate plas­tic from glass and paper until we’re blue in the face and it won’t make much more than one iota of dif­fer­ence.

And as for the afore­men­tioned sit­u­a­tion in the Span­ish state, there is lit­tle we can do but cross our fin­gers and hope for the best, or the clos­est thing to it.

In short, when Christ­mas rolls around, to­gether with its satel­lites Saint Steven’s Day, New Year’s Eve and the Day of the Kings, per­haps the only thing to be done is to quaff the cava, eat the turkey (or the carn d’olla or the seafood or the vegan casse­role or what­ever) and swal­low the grapes, while keep­ing the killing and the cli­mate and the dodgy local pol­i­tics in some men­tal safe­house, thus still al­low­ing our­selves to have some fun, but with­out fid­dling while other peo­ple’s (and maybe our own) homes burn.

Opin­ion