Rain in Ambleside, war clouds over Iran

When I left Burton-in-Kendal services just before nine last night, showered and dined, I should have been forty-five minutes tops from my destination and frequent home from home; a small triangle of car park by Waterhead Pier on the northern tip of Windermere.

Had I chosen not to use Google Maps, for a route done many times, I’d have been fine. Likewise if I’d remembered to switch from FM to blue tooth on the dashboard screen.

I did neither, and drove north at my customary fuel-parsimonious fifty in high winds and vicious bursts of rain. Tired, I was slow to register that Google Lady, she who speaks only when strictly necessary, should long ago have led me gently from M6 to the rolling bends of an A591 winding northwesterly – and slower still to conclude that I’d either forgotten to tap Start or neglected to engage blue tooth.

By the time I’d diagnosed and corrected the latter, I was nearing Shap on the northern fells: cue for a Google guided tour of damage limitation; a fraught southward drive down dark Cumbrian lanes as rain lashed my furiously wiped screen, deep gathering roadside pools forced me to hug the middle of the road at risk, should fraught attention lapse for a nanosecond, of an oncoming driver blinded by my undipped beam and, to round things off, ambush by dense fog in hollows unforeseeable without infra-red goggles demanded instantly dipped beam, fog lights and a tap dance on clutch and brake …

… all clearly taxing to the limit the patience of Tailgating Local two yards behind.

Finally I reached Kendal where, somewhat relaxed – a relative term in the circs – I picked up the A591, having spent at least ninety minutes, and untold litres of fuel, over what was needed.

Only that afternoon I’d been telling a dear friend in Lancaster how costly my bouts of absent-mindedness have become.

By the time I rolled up at Waterhead that tiny car park was full, though the layby two hundred metres north was not. Easing into a gap with pickup in front, car to my rear and stone wall to my right, I could open the driver door sufficiently without my passenger side crossing the white line bordering the 591’s southbound carriageway. I inflated Exped, fixed blinds to windows, did the dental stuff and hit the pillow. Phone said eleven-fifty. My eyes shielded from the headlights of thinning traffic between Kendal and Keswick, the intermittent thrum served as lullaby.

I awoke just before seven to the drumming of rain on my tin roof, slid into garments carefully placed the night before – in so confined a space, disorganisation is punished – and cooked breakfast on a stove set down on ground kept dry by the opened rear door above my head.

Breakfasted, I ankled over to the YHA hostel, its views of the lake unrivalled; the mediocrity of its coffee offset by free electricity, free wi-fi and, no less important, staff who couldn’t care less that I sit for hours on end over a cup of the barely drinkable. As I do now, composing or lost in thought as my eyes take in sheets of diagonal rain over a Windermere grey and choppy.

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I watch the first minutes of a three-quarter hour discussion, Is Trump wavering on Iran?, with John Mearsheimer and worthy but dull Glenn Diesen. With masses of material to take in daily, my patience in the face of prolixity is limited but both men are informed and insightful, the key stuff front loaded. There’s little I haven’t heard or said already but it’s easily set out in bullets:

• Things are so knife-edge precarious no one can truly know if it’s to be war.
• The momentum, with that enormous fleet in the region, seems irresistible but:

• • the whole wide world, including Iran’s Arab state foes who have much to lose, is against a war only Israel wants;
  • all the military indicators say a war cannot give the USA a swift victory, or in all probability any kind at all;
  • it has little support among the American public – and the mid terms loom for a now deeply unpopular president who, if the Dems capture both houses, could face impeachment;
  • it now seems clear to some at least in Washington that in the wake of the June treachery and failed CIA coup last month, Tehran, now deeming appeasement more dangerous than resistance, is not bluffing when it says any attack, even a token strike, will be met with devastating force;
  • China and Russia will do what they can – which in China’s case is considerable – to prevent Iran falling to a US empire which has them too in its sights.
• Factors on the other side of the equation are:

• • aforesaid momentum, and difficulty of painting climb-down as success;
  • looney tunes hawks like Lindsey Graham having Trump’s ear;
  • the rogue regime having a 47th president pliant even by Washington standards, his Zionist instincts probably augmented by Israel having Epstein dirt on him.
• Is Trump, the limits to his agency no more easily divined than his thinking (if that’s even a thing) seeking an off-ramp?  Eleventh hour demands by Witkoff and Kushner, with Rubio pulling the strings, did not feature in his State of the Union address two days ago. Those demands, all rejected and rightly so by Iran, being:

• • zero nuclear enrichment;
  • limits to range and number of Iran’s ace card; its ballistic missile capability;
  • ending Iran’s support for its regional allies: Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Palestine’s Hamas and Yemen’s Ansar Allah.

Draw your own conclusions from Trump’s only demand on February 24 being that Iran rule out – “they gotta say the magic words” – acquiring a thermonuclear weapon; a forswearing it has repeatedly made on moral and religious grounds.

Israel, unaccustomed to a peer adversary, learned in June to fear Iran’s missiles. Will that fear, and its attendant demand, be the deciding factor here?

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Jackie just phoned. Our house buy, stuck in a chain for ten months, just got unstuck. We move to a new steel city house a week today. A million things long on hold must now happen pdq. I will cut short my trip, and speed southerly.

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