When I find myself in times of trouble

I’d imagine my loyal reader has been expecting me to blog about Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, popularly known to his family and friends as Alex, but in times of trouble, when the local equivalent of Mother Mary doesn’t come to me, I have to let it be, albeit without speaking words of wisdom. I am trying to write about him, but with a dark cloud hanging over me, I am struggling for inspiration. I’ll tell you this, though: I hate Johnson like I haver hated few others. Margaret Thatcher, Rupert Murdoch, Kelvin MacKenzie – Johnson joins a select band of the very worst of humanity.

Honesty and truth have always mattered to me, although I’ll happily admit I made mistakes along the way. Working with incredible people in my final 15 years of full-time employment taught me that honesty and truth more than just matter.  Without them, everything we do is diminished.

I am now obsessively honest and truthful, to the point that even on job applications and on my CV my warts are front and centre. Not only do I find it the right thing to do, life is so much easier. Being a liar must be so tough because you have to retain a place in your brain for things that didn’t happen and aren’t real. I can’t confirm whether my ‘honest and truthful’ job applications and CV have had a detrimental effect on prospective employers but let’s put it this way: I have had not so much as an interview in the last year of non-employment, nor in many cases so much as an acknowledgment. Perhaps being honest and truthful doesn’t matter anymore?

It certainly hasn’t had a negative effect on Johnson’s life, as he bounces from one big job to another, from one relationship to another. A lying crook and charlatan is, it appears, what this country has been crying out for. When people say that politicians are liars and crooks and are only in it for themselves, they then vote in huge numbers for the biggest liar and crook of them all.

This is not to say that someone like Johnson gets big jobs because he is a liar and a charlatan and I don’t get any jobs at all because I am honest and truthful. That would be absurd. He had the best education money could by whereas I am largely self-taught. But I had opportunities too and those who surrounded me in my formative years failed to guide me towards them. What followed later, a lifetime of mediocrity and relative failure, was mainly down to me. By the same token, Johnson’s assent to ‘World King’ was not simply down to his mendacious dishonesty and expertise in deceiving people. Even in our unequal society, I am thinking he must have had some talent beyond self-promotion.

I still think honesty and truthfulness matters and I am minded to carry on being that way, regardless of the personal cost. Because if I am not me, then what the hell are you actually reading? The answer to that are the meanderings of a clinical depressive, albeit a decent one who doesn’t go round lying and killing people, as so many of us are assumed to do.