(0759) morning all! Looking sunny out there, diffuse, wispy cloud in a way. (0839)

11. While IYE has the DJT assass-attempt covered at 807:7

… and I added but one Natalie Winters comment to a few items in the roundup in 10, my thoughts have been on the Ruairidh MGB piece reworked and revisited … as a dedicated ragtop little roadster fan forever, now probably settle on the MX 5, a neat little machine, two things keep coming through quite powerfully to me:

*Just how much a small, convertible roadster really means to lifestyle, to civic life, to the simple enjoyment of life and I point to my “crazy” decision to visit the Cairngorms in midwinter in that car during a cold snap … just how great the renovated ragtop was in that biting wind, just how well the heater had worked.

*Just how bafflingly bad British management was … and is even today … just how bad the political class are … really the pits, the dregs of society.

These thoughts kept coming through as I watched Ruairidh on the whole Healey, MG, BMC, Leyland debacle, esp. that last noncomp of a boss … why on earth can Britain not get actual managers instead of graduates of the up themselves managerial class?

On the other hand, even if the MGB (I was always Healey oriented, not MG) had continued as the MX5 does … incremental tweaks with succeeding models, improvements in suspension and handling, modest engine improvements … would it have survived the total change to society?

This hit me more, say, than the person who largely stayed here through the Blair years, give or take a holiday abroad. I departed a quirky, immediately pre-Blair Britain … and came back to sheer hell … exacerbated by having to go through London itself, which was now no longer the London of a dozen years earlier and now, a dozen years after that in 2024 … now a cesspit, something from a dystopian film.

10. Another roundup