From now on, it’s Falmouth, not Florida

Spare a thought for poor old Pelagius. He’s worked hard all his life to find himself in a comfortable retirement, on a good pension with a tidy nest egg. But what’s he going to spend it on? With no children to leave his money to, he might as well give it all to charity. He can’t go to a Michelin starred restaurant or stay at a luxury hotel anymore; can’t fly off to distant locations for bucket-list holidays anymore; can’t eat fish or meat, or drive a petrol driven car anymore.

With a climate catastrophe just around the corner, his conscience won’t allow him to do any of these things except very occasionally. Better just to stay at home, lights turned off, heating turned down and worry about feeding his cats meat or fish containing pouches.

And of course here’s your problem. Tackling climate change demands we change our lifestyles, especially those of us in the privileged west. We have to start moderating our excesses, whether it’s cutting our use of single use plastic, reducing our carnivorous appetites or having more than 2 children. Making a difference starts here, today.

Bathing on Reunion

  A different post this time. Please find below a travel piece based on my stay on the French island of Reunion in September of this year. Enjoy...   




     BATHING ON RÉUNION

I’m on my way, and travelling in style. Having achieved the sunny uplands of retirement, I feel I can at last afford to fly club-class, a luxury I never felt I could justify during my working life.

So I lie here, legs stretched out in my little pod. Around me, my well-heeled fellow passengers, many of whom seem far too young to pay for such opulence, seem to be sleeping, though perhaps, like me, they are faking. Eyes closed, coaxed into a semi-relaxed state by the gentle hiss of our two giant turbines, I try to work out where we might be. I refuse to look at my watch; to keep checking the time on a twelve hour plane flight is to invite madness, but dinner has been served and the lights are now dimmed. Eight miles above the surface of the Earth, protected from the void by only the thinnest of aluminum skins, I try to visualize a picture of the globe: perhaps we are above Venice or Trieste, racing down Croatia’s intricate coastline along the Adriatic. In another two hours we will pass over Alexandria, continuing to head south-east to follow the course of the Red Sea. Hours later, still in the dead of night, we will cut across the Horn of Africa to cross the equator. But we will still be over a thousand miles from our destination, just two degrees north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and four hundred miles off the eastern coast of Madagascar: Ile de la Reunion. 

As the world turns beneath us, I drift into a fitful sleep.

When the Portuguese navigator Diego Fernandez Pereira discovered the island in 1507 it was uninhabited. From all accounts they found the place inhospitable, and a hundred years later it was ceded to the French, who named it after its ruling dynasty of the time, Bourbon. An almost circular island of about eight hundred square miles, with a highly active volcano at its core, they found its precipitous volcanic terrain difficult, though for the same reason, its soil was fertile and the few available flatlands would later support burgeoning plantations of lentils and vanilla. During the Napoleonic wars, the island briefly belonged to the English who then, unwisely in my view, returned it to the French in 1814. Following the French Revolution it had been decided to remove the old name, redolent of imperial overtones as it was, and it was renamed Reunion. 

Arriving after sunset I was hoping to be able to study the night sky and its unfamiliar southern stars as soon as my wife and I had settled into our hotel room, but this proved harder than I had anticipated. True, I could see Alpha Centauri glowing brightly, but any hopes I would soon be able to view the galactic core of the Milky Way (not visible in the northern hemisphere) and its attendant mini-galaxies, the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds, were soon crushed. Skies are rarely clear on Reunion, night or day. Its peaks climb nearly 4000 metres out of the Indian Ocean, trapping cloud and moisture in an intense orographic effect. Warm, moist air from the ocean is forced up, cooling and condensing into clouds and frequent rain in the interior, though thankfully less so on the coast where our hotel is situated. But the following day we soon realized how this works in practice: cloud begins to form mid-morning and by lunchtime covers most of the island. It remains warm, of course; this is, after all, a tropical island. But it is not a location suited for star-gazing. Instead we headed for our first bathing experience, in a tiny man-made lagoon just below the hotel. 

Sea-bathing is not recommended here, as guidebooks and hoteliers stress repeatedly. Its steeply shelving seafloor allows sharks to approach within feet of the shore; every year a few unwary swimmers are dragged from its waters, limbs missing or worse. Here though it was safe, and I ventured in, basking in the delightfully warm tropical sea. But there was a heavy swell, and the artificial reef was not high enough to stop the huge ocean waves crashing over it. I lost concentration watching perfect little rainbows form in the spray, and a big wave pushed me against a rock, causing me to lacerate a finger on the razor-sharp coral. I didn’t notice until my wife pointed out the drops of blood falling on the sand as I emerged. Beyond the reef, I could imagine the sharks picking up the scent and massing...

Later that day we followed the tourist trail and traced the eastern coast of the island to see the church of Notre-Dame des Laves. This was the site of a ‘miracle’ that occurred in 1977. Apparently a particularly aggressive lava flow had come roiling down the slopes of the Piton de la Fournaise, the volcano whose main fumarole lies only ten or so kilometres to the west, threatening to engulf the little church. Then, for reasons that are hard, or easy, to understand depending on your point of view, the lava diverged almost at the front door of the church before heading down to the sea. The black lava field is still there today, almost surrounding the church for all to see, and marvel at. Perhaps they shouldn’t have built a church there in the first place. It lies very close to an area known as the Grand Brûlée, a huge expanse of lava which marks the favoured direction of lava-flows from the volcano. The flows may be dated by studying the vegetation that has formed on them. Until it cools, nothing. But within a year, bright green mosses and furry-white lichens, like lambswool, begin to take hold. Soon after, ferns, bamboo and small palm trees are shooting up in Reunion’s ideal growing climate. I will never forget watching my wife dancing about over those lava fields, delighting in finding new plant growth in lava fields that looked so fresh it seemed scarcely possible they had cooled sufficiently for germination to take place. This is what she came for, what she has dreamed of doing for over twenty years. Tomorrow we shall journey into the interior and see the great fumarole for ourselves. 

Rising at dawn to take advantage of the brief window of clear skies, we were greeted at breakfast by the hotel dog. A scrupulously disciplined animal despite his uncertain lineage, he waited patiently at our table until my wife relented and gave him a minute scrap of bacon. This disappeared in a flash and he was ready for more, but I could see a waiter looking at us and discouraged her from giving him any more. Nonetheless, doggie sensed he had made a friend.

The drive up to Piton de la Fournaise is little over twenty kilometres, but the road being narrow, busy and packed with hairpins, the journey takes over an hour. When we reached the car park there was an extraordinary sight: over eighty hire-cars parked in neat lines, and whether they were Citroens, Peugeots or Renaults, they all looked just the same; by some convention, every one was white. We had all come to take the famous 10 kilometer hike to the main crater, but it had finished erupting only a few days before and was not yet assumed to be safe. In consequence the entrance to the path down into the crater was barred by a padlocked steel grille. Among the small crowd of hikers the sense of disappointment was palpable. One angry young man jerked on the chains with all his might, his actions more symbolic than hopeful. But my wife refused to be downcast, and found an alternative walk along the wall of the crater, and we were treated to some amazing sights: a landscape devoid of vegetation, pockmarked with craters, and everywhere hues of red ochre, nut-brown and pitch-black. It resembled not so much a lunar landscape as an image from the surface of Mars. 

After an hour we decide to turn back. It is 2500 metres above sea level here, and we can feel it, not so much in our lungs as in a leaden sensation that afflicts the legs after even minimal exertion. We are glad to get back to the car and eat our brie-filled rolls, filched from this morning’s breakfast table. High above us a black kite soars with infinite grace, scanning the crater floor for anything foolish enough to move. 

The weather behaved predictably. By eleven it was ‘cloudy-bright’ and cooling off; by twelve most of the interior was covered in a dense blanket of cloud and it was cold. Only the coast and a half-mile strip inland remained bathed in brilliant sunshine. We raced back down the mountain to embrace it.

                                                 *

At breakfast the following morning our new friend was waiting. When she was sure no one was watching, my wife went into the buffet, took a plate and on it placed three chicken sausages, four rashers of bacon and a generous helping of scrambled eggs. This meal, which would have cost a visitor to the hotel thirty euros, was consumed by our shaggy friend in little more time than it takes to say “Woof!” I would imagine that this represents, not only for our puppy, but I dare say for any other canine ever born, the finest dog’s breakfast in history. He was our permanent companion until we left the hotel an hour later, and we could see him sitting at the gate watching us as we drove away, a look of ineffable love on his doggy features.

We stopped for a coffee further up the coast. Just outside the cafe was a tree festooned with the nests of weaver-birds, the brilliant yellow birds darting in and out of them repeatedly. I couldn’t take my eyes off them until, beyond the tree, I noticed how inviting the little bay down from us looked. I asked the barista if it was safe to bathe there. 

“Non. Je suis desole.”

In my schoolboy French, I pointed out that there was a surfer out there making the most of the magnificent breakers. In his schoolboy English he replied:

“Yes, but he will be aware of the risks.”

I asked if he knew the nearest location where we could swim safely, and he directed us to a natural lagoon about three miles up the coast. Coral reefs present a barrier for sharks, leaving a narrow strip of safe water between reef and shore. We lost no time driving up there and taking to the waters. A good sign: plenty of other people were in the sea already, and being the weekend, most of them were locals out for the day. They would know which areas were safe. The water was superb, warm and clear, though to my surprise there was still a powerful undertow which dragged swimmers parallel to the shore. Swimming against it was virtually impossible, and even standing knee deep in the water it was hard not to be swept off your feet. But you got used to it quickly, learning to swim at an angle to get back to the beach. It became a kind of game, providing yet another of those idyllic episodes this island provides in abundance.

We would have stayed longer, but we wanted to reach our next hotel before the weather turned. Cilaos lies almost in the middle of the island, and the road to it includes over four hundred hairpins and sharp corners over its thirty kilometre length. For all I know this is a record: I have driven over several Alpine passes in my time, but I have never encountered anything like it. By some miracle I achieved it without any damage to our car, despite the surprisingly heavy traffic, not even flicking off a wing mirror, something I have often done when driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road. And it was hard to keep my mind on task, because around every corner was a new, amazing vista of jagged peaks, gnawing at the sky, towering rock walls, five hundred metres high, and terrifying ravines of vivid green, their floors hidden in deep shade.

The following morning, in brilliant sunlight, we set out to make a four hundred metre descent into one of those ravines to find a noted waterfall. Downhill all the way, negotiating a series of steps cut into the basalt, we often needed to step aside to allow younger and fitter hikers to overtake. I consoled myself with the thought that for many of them I was not only old enough to be their father, at sixty-eight I was old enough to be their grandfather. Half way down we came across a glorious plunge pool. Ten metres across, about two deep, with a huge, magical boulder at its centre, its waters, reflecting the lush vegetation that crowded around it, seemed to glow with an opalescent, blue-green radiance. We stripped off, caring little for the astonished glances of passers-by, and immersed ourselves in its depths. Allowing the sun’s warmth to dry ourselves off, we were ready to put our clothes back on and proceed within minutes.

Half an hour later we were at the floor of the gorge, scrambling with some difficulty over the huge boulders that surrounded the river, scoured smooth as polished marble by the passage of water over many millennia. But what was surprising was how far away from the river some of these boulders were. Some of them were a full twenty metres above the riverbed. What it implied was that on many, many occasions in the past, this fairly docile river must have been a vast, raging torrent of floodwater. And then I remembered. Reunion lies along the path of cyclones and tropical storms which regularly track west across the Indian Ocean, and its orographic effect ensures that prodigious amounts of rain are dumped upon it. Indeed, Reunion holds the world record for rainfall in a twenty-four hour period. Starting on the night of January seventh, 1966, Cyclone Denise passed over the island and released no less than seventy-two inches of precipitation. To put it in context, that represents the better part of two years of rain in Cardiff falling in a single day. So we are forced to conclude that this modest little waterfall, so innocent-looking in this dry season, must, once or twice each year, look more like Niagara.

To our relief, the sky clouded over during our exhausting ascent back up the ravine, and indeed, a few drops of rain did fall, almost as if conjured by my thoughts down at the riverside.

                                                   *

On our last full day on Reunion I decided to take my final bathe: in the pool at our hotel. Unfortunately, it proved the only discordant note in an otherwise blissful sojourn. I had watched as a tall young Frenchman dived in and swam two twenty metre lengths under water. I did likewise and achieved a single length submerged; not bad I felt, considering I was probably three times his age. He was as pale as a bedsheet, pencil-thin, and his face, which wore a permanently dour expression, was framed by a full, meticulously trimmed beard. Then he was joined by his partner, whose face, as pale as his, was characterized by that kind of angular severity so typical of many French women. She proceeded to wrap her long legs around him, and lock her outstretched hands around the back of his neck. Pelvises locked together, they drifted around the pool for many minutes, not smiling but staring intently into each other’s eyes. I soon got out and went back to my lounger, but they continued in this way, right in my eye-line, for another twenty minutes before I decided I had had enough. I stalked up to the hotel and collared an assistant manager.

“There are people down in the pool simulating sex! It’s not good enough!”

She stared at me for the briefest time before diverting her gaze and replying:

“Well, I’m not going to say anything to them.”

With that she walked away, and as the truth of it was that I didn’t have the balls to confront them myself, I retreated to our room. I was a little shocked at the under-manager’s complacency, but worse was to come later when during our evening meal I told my wife what I had done. She exploded.

“What the hell did you do that for? Are you nuts?”

This stunned me at first. Normally we are highly supportive of each other’s views, and her condemnation of my actions left me dumbstruck for a moment. Finally I spoke up. Such arrogant behaviour, I maintained, would never be tolerated at home. 

“I’d have said get a room, but...”

“I know, but this isn’t home, darling, it’s France. Just think for a moment. If this were Cannes or St Tropez, no one would turn a hair.”

She was right. I had been a fool to complain. On the flight home I reflected on the incident and why it had upset me so much. Was it envy of their youth and their uninhibited display of sexuality? Or was there something to my grievance, that people, French or otherwise, should indeed behave in a more circumspect manner in public places? I remained undecided, but as we retraced our route back to northern climes, I did resolve that, should anything like it happen again, it would be better to keep my mouth shut and just not look. And maybe, even relax a little...

September 2019 film review

YIELD TO THE NIGHT (1956) D- J. Lee Thompson
A pretty young thing (Diana Dors) falls for a smooth-talking git, but then he snags an heiress. In her mind, there’s only one thing to do: shoot the heiress.  Immediately apprehended, she admits her guilt and is sentenced to hang. End of. Pretty much. But no. Because actually the strength of this film, and what proves that Diana Dors was much more than a pneumatic British version of Jayne Mansfield, are the scenes inside her cell on Death Row, as she struggles to come to terms with the terrible fate that awaits her. Here we find that Diana Dors can really act, as we are totally persuaded by her reaction to her terrible plight.

The screenplay was apparently written before the story of Ruth Ellis broke, though the parallels are obvious. She, as you will recall, was the last woman in England to hang, following the murder of her errant boyfriend. The case hurried the long overdue removal of the death penalty in Britain. The death penalty didn’t deter her reckless act of pure emotion, just as it doesn’t deter the thousands of murderers every year in the U.S. But there they still hang on to the deterrence principle, just as they hang on to other outdated concepts of social policy, like allowing anyone to own AR15s or AK47s. But I digress...

AQUAMAN (2018) D- James Wan
In a hypothetical world, Aquaman (played by an excessively gorgeous Jason Momoa), a kind of well-toned merman, is the leader of the Ocean people in their struggle against the evil ones of the land (that’s us). In his quest for justice and freedom for starfish and so on, he is ably assisted by other equally gorgeous mermaids (Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman etc) and 143 minutes and a hell of a lot of CGI later the aqua-people emerge... well you wouldn’t want me to spoil it for you, so I won’t. Suffice it to say I was slightly underwhelmed by this effort, despite facing the opprobrium of millions who did, voting it 66% on Rotten Tomatoes and making it a profit of a cool quarter of a billion dollars.

But I will say the players look great on screen, and you can certainly see where the money went, when it wasn’t paying the salaries of the leads. If you like this sort of thing, you know, Avengers type stuff, then I guess this is for you. Enjoy.

LITTLE MAN TATE (1991) D- Jodie Foster
A trailer-trash girl in the boondocks has a son who has an IQ of 180 or so, making him one of the cleverest children in America. But she (Jodie Foster, for whom this film marked her directorial debut) isn’t really that interested. She’s more concerned about making an honest buck, and even when teacher Dianne Wiest implores her to take the proper steps to nurture his massive brain, she takes a bit of persuading. Finally she relents and allows him to go to a school for gifted children. Even there it isn’t that easy for our kid, who finds that a having a high IQ doesn’t mean you won’t get bullied by someone just as bright as you, only bigger.

I have to say I got a lot out of this movie, which demonstrated that Foster could direct as well as act. The difficulties of being brilliant are skilfully illustrated, and I loved the closing moment, when our hero, Fred, voices over:
“I was a bit overawed by all the attention at school, but then a six-year old kid joined us who’s going to law school and now nobody’s really interested in me anymore.”
Priceless.

HOTEL MUMBAI (2019) D- Anthony Maras
In 2008, trained and financed by a particularly evil jihadi group in Pakistan, a group of killers select various luxury locations in Mumbai, India, to carry out their dread mission: to wipe out as many rich people as they can.

Recording events in an almost drama-doc style, this film takes us very close to feeling the kind of fear the people exposed to it must have experienced. Although I know what happened, I still felt my knuckles going white as I watched to see who would escape the bombs and bullets, and who would not. And although the film has received some criticism for lack of character development, I found the whole package pretty worthwhile. There was a nasty Russian mafia type guy (played rather well by Jason Isaacs) who they could have done more with, and others they dwelled on a bit too much, but as I say, in the end it was a gripping, and, at times, extremely harrowing movie. This film was a ‘Sky Original’, which is something of a departure for them, because they tend to focus more on TV series, but it isn’t a bad attempt to break into the streaming platform movie production realm. Let’s see what they do next.

September 2019 book review part 2

UNDERLAND, by Robert McFarlane

In his latest book, McFarlane takes us on a dizzying journey into the depths of the Earth. He rightly points out how little we think about what lies beneath our feet, yet there is a whole world down there- or in fact many worlds. He shows us round a few of them: a dark matter detector in a salt mine half a mile under the Yorkshire dales, the labyrinthine corridors of now disused limestone quarries beneath the streets of central Paris, into a moulin, or sinkhole, in a Greenland glacier that leads hundred of metres down to the bedrock, and many, many others.

What struck me most vividly about this book, as with David Attenborough’s latest TV series Our Planet, is the way Mcfarlane drums into us, page after page, the jeopardy we have placed the Earth in, and how something MUST be done, and done NOW, to avoid an unprecedented catastrophe. There is a wonderful section on what has been called the ‘Wood-Wide-Web’, the underground connection between trees which is mediated through fungal networks, which benefits the trees as well as the fungi. Apparently trees are actually capable of helping each other by transferring nutrients to diseased trees through the network. Incredible, but true, yet all is under threat from ignorant and cynical exploitation of the Earth’s resources. 

This is a wonderful book, beautifully written as always with McFarlane, but deeply disturbing too.

I for one will never look at a tree, at a copse, or a forest, in quite the same way again.

PALM BEACH FINLAND, by Antti Tuomainen

A developer has the brilliant idea of creating a Florida-style beach resort on the southern coast of Finland. Only two things stand in his way: the fact that, as he admits, there are only 7.5 hot days in Finland per year, and a recalcitrant homeowner who won’t sell her beachfront house so he can expand. He gets two loser employees to put the frighteners on her, but that goes wrong and someone ends up dead. An undercover cop is brought in to investigate on the QT, but things get a bit complicated when he falls for the rather attractive homeowner. Later things get a lot more complicated than that...

With his quirky, jokey style overlaying some very dark events, Tuomainen has created a cracking little thriller, good character building and plot development being his great strengths. I charged through this book at great speed, and enjoyed every minute. Strongly recommended if you like a bit of Nordic noir.

September 2019 book review part 1

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, by Richard Flanagan
A young Australian man does well at school, qualifies as a doctor and is about to carve a successful career for himself when two things happen: first he falls in love with a married woman, then, war breaks out and he is called up to serve in the Far East. Taking a lot of emotional baggage with him, he soon finds plenty of things to distract him, most notably that he is almost immediately taken prisoner by the Japanese, who regard P.O.Ws as cowards and therefore not worthy of any of the human rights guaranteed them by the Geneva Convention. As senior officer as well as the only doctor, he has to stand by as his men fall prey to beri-beri, pellagra, cholera and, worst of all, the cynical and extreme cruelty of their captors.

Finally he is released at the end of the war, irretrievably scarred by his experiences, he resumes his medical career, but there is always something missing in his life. Like love, for example...

This book is stunning. Full of beauty as well as horror, I found it quite the most powerful piece of writing I have encountered in some years. The reader is completely immersed in the lives of the characters, feels the heat and humidity of the jungle, suffers with the prisoners through their terrible ordeal. Carries my highest recommendation.

THE NARROW ROAD TO THE DEEP NORTH, AND OTHER TRAVEL PIECES, by Matsuo Basho
Basho was a poet who lived in Japan in the latter part of the 17th century, and is now regarded as the greatest exponent of Haiku, the 3 line, 17 syllable format by which poets express some special insight about the natural world, and sometimes themselves. And this story, which mixes prose with haiku, takes us on a journey the poet took to visit important Buddhist shrines, other poets and ascetics, like himself, and generally undertake a journey of the mind and spirit as much as the body.

It’s a very human story. On one occasion, for instance, he takes a long detour to see the full moon rise over a Buddhist temple, only for it to remain cloudy all night, thus denying him the experience he has dreamed of for so long. Or when he returns from one trip, and writes:

Shed of everything else,
I still have some lice
I picked up on the road-
Crawling on my summer robes.

Note this does not conform to the format I mentioned above. The translator, Nobyuki Yuasa, has made a decision that in order to bring the full character and beauty of Basho’s haikus to life in English, he needs to use this format of his own design. But it’s not “wrong” to do this. The Japanese poets themselves used a variety of different formats when it suited them. Finally, I cannot resist quoting one more haiku for you, this one being regarded as possibly the ultimate flowering of his skill:

Breaking the silence
Of an ancient pond,
A frog jumped into water -
A deep resonance.

Obviously Flanagan borrowed the title of his book from Basho, and I believe we are meant to take from this the fact that the protagonist of the novel is himself on a spiritual journey of his own- which in a way, he is. But what I found as I read Basho’s account of his travels, his gentleness, his love of beauty and peace, his supreme insight into the human condition that all the greatest poets have, that fast forward three centuries, his own countrymen, no different in essence from Basho himself, would be committing some of the grossest atrocities against their fellow human beings the world has ever seen.

Bolsonaro: the new Trump

We all worried when we heard Trump got elected, with his disregard of  any environmental concerns and his love of big money (these, of course, go together like beans on toast). But unfortunately, and just as some of us feared, the politics of the whole world took a lurch to the right, nowhere better personified than in Brazil, with the election of arch-populist Bolsonaro, who early on in his rule said he would be happy to pave over the Amazon if that would aid ‘progress’.

We thought he was joking, but unfortunately for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest, he wasn’t. He has allowed legal logging and development of this unique and precious place to proceed apace, and turned a blind eye to the even more pernicious practices of illegal mining projects. In their frantic greed for gold, these people are pouring toxins such as mercury into the watercourses, an agent which is poisonous to all forms of life. Mercury is part of the process of the extraction of gold, and gold fever has gripped Brazil. Who cares, as long as a profit is made? Not the mine owners certainly, and not Senor Bolsonaro either.

I was thinking yesterday that normally we like to think of the world moving gradually forward to a better, more enlightened place. But recent evidence, in Brazil and in a Trump administration that refuses to admit the reality of climate change and human involvement in it, we are actually moving backwards into a new dark age. Don’t say I didn’t warn you...

Jo takes a step too far

When Jo Swinson, leader of the LibDems, announced that should they win the next election they would cancel Brexit without even the recourse to a second referendum, I felt she made a serious error.

The LibDems have made major strides in recent months, constituting as they do one of the major bulwarks against the arch-right-wingers of the Brexit party. Many people voted for them rather than their usual fall-back position of Labour or Tory because of their ambiguous posture on Brexit. And they would, I believe, have made a terrific showing in the next election on that strength alone. Now, though, I’m not so sure.

I wish we’d never held a referendum in the first place. I wish David Cameron had held out against the Brexiteer ‘bastards’ in his own party in the same way as John Major did - basically by telling them to go and fuck themselves. But he didn’t, and 17 million people, 52% of the voters, voted leave. Certainly I would like to see a second vote- what’s wrong with testing public opinion again after a 3-4 year gap in a decision as important as this? But defying the wishes of those 17 million people altogether, ignoring them in fact, could have terrible consequences, for the nation, which might see not only the worst civil disorder this country has seen since the Civil War should such a thing come to pass, but to the LibDems themselves for even suggesting such a thing.

I foresee a dramatic downturn in their fortunes now because of it. Change your mind on this one, Jo, and do it quick, before you run your party onto the rocks.