Monday 15th November 2021

As the new week begins I can but reflect on the strange happenings at the COP 26 climate conference that finally ground to an ignominious finale 24 hours later than scheduled on the not so bonny banks of the post-industrial Clyde. Instead of watching the usual Saturday tea time footy match I found myself transfixed to the sadly surreal spectacle of High Tory host Alok Sharma fighting back his salty tears over an apparently unavoidable compromise that involved changing one vital sentence of the event’s final document from ‘phasing out’ coal subsidies to merely ‘phasing down’ coal subsidies. This Indo-Chinese volte face came in the midst of a seemingly endless procession of bafflingly technical procedural announcements that Sharma had been given the unenviable task of reading out to the 200 national delegations and the millions of TV viewers like myself, many of whose footy withdrawal symptoms had been worsened by being forced to face up to the terrible futility and pointlessness of human existence as we all head towards self-inflicted annihilation. Our attention was jarringly returned to the here and now by Mr. Sharma when he unexpectedly burst into tears and informed the delegates, and the rest of us, how terribly, terribly sorry he was that all their efforts now amounted to the square root of absolutely bugger all and that all that was left for him to do was to beg them to forgive him for his unacceptable inadequacies. This was as dramatic as a 94^th minute equaliser, although a couple of hours later poor old Alok was back on the box telling us, as if his earlier histrionics had been cancelled out by some geo-political form of VAR, that the whole event had been a wonderful success. It was rather like Ole Gunnar Solsjaer announcing in a post-match interview that Man United losing nil-five to Liverpool wasn’t really so bad after all.