Britain is falling apart at the seams – how the prime minister is holding it all together is a mystery

I can barely handle the anguish of life admin without exploding. God knows how Theresa May hasn’t cracked yet

Jenny Eclair
Monday 24 September 2018 15:07 BST
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Theresa May: 'I have treated the EU with nothing but respect'

Some weeks are tougher than others, and last week was infuriating. At chez Éclair, Storm Ali ripped my bedroom blind in half, which means that I’ll have to buy two new bedroom blinds (there are two windows in the bedroom with matching ones, and a certain blind company no longer make that particular shade of linen anymore, so instead of buying one blind, I’ll have to replace the pair).

Yawn, to be honest with you. Anything that requires measuring and screwdrivers is so boring and complicated that all I want to do is hide under the bed and wait for someone else to take over and sort it out.

A lot of adult life is like this isn’t it? Really upsetting and worrying and time consuming and expensive and tedious.

Personally, if I could live the rest of my life without ever having to fill in a form or put a stamp on an envelope (unless it’s for a birthday card) again then I’d be quite happy. But life just constantly trips you up and tricks you into having to go to the post office. Mostly because you need to return something stupid you bought off the internet, which in your head was a pink linen, heavily embroidered kaftan top, but which in reality turned out to be a tiny polyester rag from China with a bit of patterned material attached to the yoke, instead of the lush embroidery you were expecting.

Actually in this case, the website turned out to be bogus, so I couldn’t even queue up for 45 minutes in the post office to return it. So obviously, in a fit of self-sabotage and because I am incapable of learning a lesson, I bought something else stupid from the internet and ended up in there anyway.

In fact, I spent most of last week silently screaming; everything that could go wrong, went wrong. I left a tuna salad in the boot of the car and went berserk trying find it, every avocado I bought was brown in the middle, there were weevils in the cereal and it turns out those delicious flat peaches give me mouth ulcers, arghhhhh. Some weeks are entirely butter-side down aren’t they?

Theresa May has been living this butter-side down kind of life now for over two years. I’ve had a week of bad luck and being thwarted, and it’s left me gibbering in front of the telly, having to drink chardonnay in my pyjamas and watch repeats of Bake Off and MasterChef in order to calm down.

How does May cope? Why is she still bothering with the stupid job? Nobody likes her. All her colleagues are constantly ganging up against her – in fact, I’m surprised they haven’t stuck a sign on her back saying “kick me”. I bet no one on her side of the house ever invites her to their birthday parties.

She can’t even dance without looking a little crazy and yet she sticks at it, day by day, week by week, month by month, with her “I’m so together” bobbed hair and her lipstick on her mouth and not all over her teeth, and her cardi done up properly. When does she let go? When does she give in and start biting pillows? Does she ever punch herself in the head? Because that’s what I did when I couldn’t find my tuna salad.

How can she keep it together while the entire country falls apart around her ears, when John Lewis reports a staggering 99 per cent drop in profits and every other department store on the high street is crashing in slow motion into the wall? When Evans Cycles is on the brink of collapse and Orla Kiely goes bust?

When Tesco has to complete with itself by opening some down-market, cut-price, cheap tinned peas supermarket and everything we ever had that was good and decent – from nice handbag shops to the NHS – is slipping away? This country is slowly bankrupting itself and soon all that will be left is great pallets of dented tins of veg in brine and the entire nation will be wearing foul clothes made by kids in countries that are only a little bit worse off than we are, because we can’t afford anything that isn’t slashed down to the very barest of bones.

Surely May is screaming inside, surely one day the woman will crack. Personally I reckon she missed a massive opportunity last Friday, when, faced with a loss of power at Downing Street, which delayed the Brexit proceedings, she called a press conference and spoke primly about how badly the EU is treating us, blah, blah.

If only she’d come out properly pissed off, I might have a bit more respect for her. If only she’d rended her garments and torn at her hair and called the EU a bunch of arseholes and given them the finger live on the telly; if only she’d behaved like I did when I lost my tuna salad then I might feel she had a fighting chance, but I don’t.

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