Despair as Graun turns to eco lavatories,edible avocado skins and poetry

The Graun is a bit thin on Brexit and the election this morning. No real surprises even with this massive scoop:

Democratic Unionist party leader, Arlene Foster, said Johnson betrayed unionist voters in Northern Ireland when he sealed a deal with the EU that would introduce a trade barrier down the Irish Sea, contrary to a personal promise he had made when he spoke at their annual conference last year.

The Graun has been deriding the DUP as bigoted dinosaurs for years, of course.

J Harris seeks consolation in the Toynbee vision of old people dying off and thus inaugurating the new politics of militant millenarianism:

By contrast with Labour’s 450,000-plus members, the Conservatives are reckoned to have around 160,000. How many of them are active is unclear, but four out of 10 are aged over 65, and 70% are men...what will they do when the noise around Brexit has abated?...the British right’s intellectual vanguard [who they?] seems consumed by such issues as campus free speech, and the west’s supposed civilisational clash with Islam....if I were a Tory, I would worry about the public’s low, rumbling unease, and where it might go in the future...The Tories may be about to win, but if they do, it looks set to be the most pyrrhic of victories.

And there is some old tired stuff here: 

Prime minister wrote for Spectator in defence of opponents of gay people joining military and claimed police were ‘cowed’ by Macpherson report

The Graun looks to a more hopeful future: 

Avocados that stay ripe for twice as long as usual thanks to an edible coating on their skin made from plant materials will go on sale in Europe for the first time this week.

And this

We squander masses of clean water flushing away our own waste instead of using it as fertiliser. But a lavatorial eco revolution has now begun

It is still worrying -- who will pick those avocados and carry away that night soil if there is no free movement of underpaid Romanians? Luckily there is always poetry, including this by H Dunkerley:

Referendum

On the night of the vote
thunder boomed across the city,
its echo crumbling into the distance.
I slept badly, woken
by livid flashes of light,
nagging dreams and premonitions.
We don’t believe in portents anymore
but maybe, just this once,
the lie was so enormous
it shook the old gods from their slumber.

And this by Vidyan Ravinthiran (abridged)

 … Carefully, after an explanation,
he put into Arabic my small poem about small people: repression
and fear in the country of Nigel Farage.

 And sentimental naturalism ending in this by Wisława Szymborska

Only what is human can truly be foreign.
The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.

OK I'm convinced -- it's tactical voting for me, after a quick check with the vegetation, moles and wind.