Days after the end of the holiest day.

 Days after the end of the holiest day.

A couple of days after the holiest day in the Jewish calendar and the world of food and drink has never tasted so good. For those who take digestion and daily nourishment for granted this may sound quite bizarre. But Yom Kippur remains one of the most challenging if ultimately rewarding days any Jew can possibly experience. You starve yourself for 25 hours and then discover that all of that stomach rumbling abstinence and discipline hasn't left any adverse or damaging side effects on your health. In other words you're still alive, well, functioning and firing on all cylinders, healthy and ready to go again.

Admittedly, Yom Kippur will never be regarded as one of the more pleasant days in your life since nobody would willingly go without a day of eating and drinking if they could possibly help it. But we're all prepared for the year ahead in the Jewish calendar which probably still seems funny at the beginning of October. There are no New Year Jewish resolutions or a stubborn determination to get fit and lose weight but we do like the end of the Yom Kippur fast when it's actually permissible to stuff yourselves with as much food as your heart desires. And so it is that we move forward to the present day and the here and now. 

Where were we? That's it. We're in much the same pickle as we were before the High Holy Days. A new Prime Minister had just been appointed and of course Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the second had sadly died. While that was going on we were still confronted by the abominations and horrors that are still raging in Ukraine. If it isn't one thing then it has to be another. There are never any dull events because if that was the case then perhaps we'd question the status quo. 

When Liz Truss took charge of the country as our new Prime Minister some of us were just resigned to the fact that surely things couldn't get any worse than they already were. Previous PM incumbent Boris Johnson had taken us on a turbulent roller coaster of emotions that left most of us dumbfounded with incredulity and sometimes laughing our heads off at the insane absurdity of the Johnson leadership. There must have come a point when most of us had thought that enough was enough. But it did seem to drag on interminably and now we're stuck in the middle of a mess that may take ages to mop up.

Essentially Truss has been left with the daunting task of digging us out of a hole, rescuing us from a most dire predicament. As a comparative novice at the helm of one of the toughest jobs you could ever be lumbered with, Truss has, if you were to believe some commentators, just exacerbated a problem that was already there in the first place. So it now becomes abundantly clear that Truss isn't that much of a marked improvement on dear Boris Johnson. It could hardly get any worse or so we thought. But it did and it has. 

In the wake of the Tories party conference in Birmingham all the mood music and vibes are far from favourable. Truss is being deafened by the boisterous big boys and girls who are now calling for her to go promptly, pronto, if it all possible, now. So where should we start? It's normally the beginning but this is very much an ongoing process that could sharply deteriorate within the next couple of weeks or so. Things are unravelling at a quite frightening speed and buckle yourself in for yet more turbulence at the highest level of Government.

There was Kwasi Kwarteng, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer who probably thought the job would become the poisoned chalice that most of his predecessors had been expected to deal with. He was no Ken Clarke or Sir Geoffrey Howe from yesteryear but he was immensely qualified for the job and everybody thought Britain was in safe and capable hands under his financially astute control of our money.

But here we are just over a month or so into their new jobs in the Cabinet and the Tories are behaving with all of the childish petulance of the proverbial Punch and Judy show. Everybody is blaming each other and nobody wants to accept any that may be coming their way. The flak is flying, Judy is taking some terrible punishment from Punch and his sausages and it's all rather embarrassingly silly, unseemly and not a good watch. That is not the way to do it. 

So what seems to be the main crux of the problem. The long and short of it is that the Tories have announced measures that will make life almost unbearably difficult and painful for us. There are tax cuts but not the kind most of the British public would have anticipated. Put simply the wealthy elites will get just considerably richer than they already are and the working-class proletariat simply poorer by the hour, day, minute, week, month and year. 

By now most of us are familiar with the intricacies of the windfall tax, the cost of living crisis and above all the survival of the fittest. The implication is of course that a vast majority of us will be feeling the pinch this winter and must be prepared for the power cuts that plunged the United Kingdom into the dark chaos of the mid 1970s. The whole of Britain has been told to brace itself for one of the coldest, most miserable and frighteningly uncomfortable winter in recent history. So it might be advisable to buy packets of candles and plenty of torches just in case somebody suddenly switches off the electricity without our permission. 

And just to make matters even more intolerable and awkward, there is the one section of society who must never ever be neglected. Britain's pensioners have given admirable service to the country throughout decades and to imagine their desperate plight doesn't bear thinking about. Most of them are alone, neglected, struggling to keep warm and just shabbily mistreated. Now though they must be our top priority, our main consideration since the old have been horrifically sent out into the cold if not quite metaphorically. It remains a shameful state of affairs that has to be immediately addressed.

Then there's the energy and fuel imbroglio, a small matter of the country's welfare to be going on with. Petrol prices have soared to an astronomical high and the extortionate price of milk came as a major shock to some of us. We've all been given the choice to eat or heat, an ultimatum that should never have been given the time of the day let alone thought of. So if you're thinking of turning up the central heating this winter and foregoing the essential necessity of good, hearty dinner of egg and chips then this is not the time to panic. 

The truth is that the buck, as they say, stops at the Tory government. Do they stick or twist? Are we now in a state of damage limitation or will our top, eminent economists and industrialists simply tell us to just keep calm. We are now in a land of percentages of the nation who may be in the wrong tax brackets and then those who may have to resign themselves to a Dickensian scenario where the costermongers, the chimney sweeps, the underclass and the oppressed just bite their poverty-stricken lip.

At the moment Liz Truss is almost a lost cause before she's had even the barest chance of leaving her mark on the British landscape. Everywhere the landowners and aristocrats, the grocers and bakers are patiently awaiting their fate. This is quite the most unprecedented time in our lives. We thought we'd seen everything but quite certainly not. It is a good time to be alive and always will be if only because drama keeps knocking on our door and we keep telling it that it may have to take off its shoes before it enters into our living rooms.

You're reminded of a long and much-loved TV soap or sitcom whereby every episode comes up with some original twist on the previous one. This long running sequence is losing its edge, its sense of intrigue because we can all anticipate the next plot. Now the theme is a recurring one and faintly distasteful since nobody gave the Tories the right to do whatever they felt was right for the economy.

So here we are on the Friday, the day that recently proved what could be the decisive turning point in Britain's fortunes. For it was on this day a fortnight ago or so that Kwasi Kwarteng made that serious and portentous statement about the country's finances. It was the day when it all kicked off. Labour went berserk quite naturally, the Lib Dems thought they were imagining things and most of the rest of the nation threw up their hands in complete horror and mortification. Get rid of Truss before they take to the streets of London. Set the wheels of democracy into motion. It could all get very inflammatory, hot headed and tempestuous. We await the immediate future with bated breath. Hold on Britain and Middle England and the United Kingdom.