Brexit breakthrough

I woke up in good time again to upload the Morning Prayer video and stayed in bed a whille longer as it was yet another dark miserable rainy day outside. After breakfast, I went to the midweek Eucharist at St Catherine's. There were ten of us. Emma and Dominic are back on duty, which is very good news for the Parish. After lunch I collected the organic veg bag from Conway Road, crowned with a well populated stalk of Brussels sprouts a winter and a Christmas favourite plus lots of freshly root veg. 

I underestimated how heavily it was raining. My waterproof jacket and trousers were sodden by the time I got back. I had to change both. I decided to relax for a few minutes and listen to the news before going out again to walk the rest of my daily mileage. I slept for more than an hour before going out into the rain again. With such low cloud, it got dark very quickly. I don't think I've ever seen such huge pools of water on Llandaff Fields. It's just as well that the Taff is much less likely to burst out of its watercourse and flood the fields, now that the banks have been cleared of excess vegetation, improving the speed at which huge volumes of excess water drain away. With fields so waterlogged, flood waters would travel much further towards housing areas.

At last today, good news from the negotiations between the European Commission and UK government. Agreement has now been reached on every aspect of future relations and last of all and most importantly trading terms, which negotiators have been struggling with over the past six month or more. Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed. That's the accepted principle. No detail of the trade deal have been released yet. Some details are still being worked out now that principles and procedures, two thousand pages of them, have been agreed, but political leaders and commentators are sounding more positive than they have for many months. Compromises have been made and it won't be long before there will be reactions from noisy hardened separatists both sides of the Channel.

The number of lorries still stuck and waiting to cross the Channel after border closures is now over four thousand. It's due to the sharp rise in a mutant strain of coronavirus cases recently identifies as behind the latest surge. The French government has agreed to let lorries and their drivers continue their journeys once they've been tested for the virus. It's causing huge frustration and resentment among both drivers and local residents whose lives are disrupted by a 24/7 traffic jam on their doorstep. Getting the tests done quickly  is a logistic nightmare. It's giving the region a foretaste of what could happen without or even with a brexit deal, as there's so much bureaucracy attached to any country not part of the Common Market. Brexiteers will get what they voted for, perhaps not quite what they wished. I can't imagine that resentment against them will fade any time soon. Political efforts to reconcile leavers and remainers seem destined to fail with things the way they are.