It's time for positivity all round.

Creative Clara has been taking a few days off from blogging, because frankly she has been rather in despair since her last blog! She and Clever Bird have been upset by the aftermath of the British General Election and haven't known quite how to respond. The overwhelming win by the conservatives, came as zero surprise to Clever Bird. The moment that they were the only party promising to deliver Brexit, it was obvious that they would succeed. As Clara said in her previous blog last March, ( http://baggybodysback.blogspot.com/2019/03/putting-world-to-rights.html ), the silent majority were always going to back the decision that they made in the referendum, as soon as they got the opportunity to. Clever Bird cannot understand how anyone would think differently. The government asked whether the people thought that Britain should leave the European Union; they said that Britain should. The people who voted to leave, were then ignored, called every name under the sun, made to feel that they were idiots who knew no better, patronised, and told, 'that of course they would change their minds once they knew the 'true' facts.' 

But how is anyone, ever going to know the 'true' facts about anything as huge, important and complex as running a country? Even the people that run it, only know part of the picture - their part that they are directly involved in; the bigger picture is managed by thousands of people: politicians, civil servants, Lords, local government representatives, advisors, consultants, all contributing their expertise. And as with the referendum, this latest general election seemed to be promoted on all sides by negative propaganda. Clever Bird just cannot understand, staunch supporters of whichever party, shared nothing except negative facts about the opposition on their social media. 

Instead of, 'Vote for whoever, because they will deliver x,y and z brilliant policies,' it was always, 'If you vote for whoever, you are wrong, wrong, wrong, and an ignorant whatever.' The election is now over, and yet the hatred and vitriol seems to have got worse, rather than better. Friends and family are threatening to disown each other and end relationships, total strangers are merrily slagging each other off in public, it's awful, and Hormonal Hannah can't handle it. What's more, Clever Bird doesn't understand how anyone expects to sway someone else's opinion on anything, let alone something as emotive as which political party they vote for, by calling them every name under the sun, and telling them that they are wrong.

Freda Fretter just prays that friends can remain friends, families can continue to respect that they may not agree on everything, but that they are still family, and the people who run Britain, can stop slagging each other off for long enough to look after the country. Rant over. And apologies Baggees for discussing politics at all. It's not something that Clara likes to do in this blog, which is supposed to be a lighthearted account of Baggy's days, but it's hard to ignore the current state of the country that Baggy loves, when even a woman in the vets thought that it was okay to start laying into the receptionist about how anyone who voted for the current government is wrong, wrong, wrong, and an ignorant whatever. And people wonder why the majority remain silent.

Clever Bird would like to think that over the Christmas holidays, friends and family can set their political differences aside, and work together to make the world a better place!

Meanwhile, Baggy still isn't feeling 100%. It's been a struggle to persuade her to get out-and-about. But the pooch needs his exercise, so she has been walking him. He however, has skinned his back pads again, so yesterday Furry Mama put his little boots on him.

He did a walk from the comedy selection of walks, until Furry Mama decided to risk letting him off lead in Halesworth park, and threw the ball for him. The pooch instantly forgot that he had boots on...

... and chased his ball.

Once he'd realised that he could run in them, he started to walk normally!

Travelling at this time of year in Billy Bob Jalopy campervan is not quite as comfortable. Forty-year-old campers, don't exactly have modern heating - more accurately, they don't really have any heating, so Baggy has a solution for herself:

And for her pooch:

And having made it home from the beach in the cold camper, the house with its new heating, is also cold! So British Gas returned for the third time last Friday, and Hormonal Hannah had a bit of a meltdown at the engineer who arrived. He was a good guy though, and he spent time explaining how the system works to The Domestic Goddess. Having bled a couple of the radiators, he explained how the individual thermostats on the radiators worked; they measure the air temperature above them. The air temperature that gets hot quickly, when the thermostat is hidden under a curtain and behind the sofa! So as the engineer spoke to his boss about the bedroom radiators that are attached to nothing except 300-year-old wattle-and-daub, The Goddess rearranged the sitting room (again).

Once more a sofa is blocking a door, but for some reason, this time Hannah rather likes it. And the pooch is enjoying pretending that he's a cat, sitting on the back of the moved chair.

Freda Fretter is just hoping that the engineer who will be coming this Friday to move the bedroom radiators so that they are safe, is not one of the incompetent ones who did the work in the first place...

Note to readers: For the avoidance of any doubt, every character in this blog is Baggy! No Baggy was harmed in its writing, although some of them get pretty confused!