It’s a very chilly St. George’s day. Forty four years ago, I tottered around the village with my very large baby-bump in warm sunshine. We must have had a few weeks of sunshine because I was quite tanned. One of the benefits of being pregnant is that even fair-skinned ginger-heads tan more easily. Several people told me to “get that baby born today and call him George”. “That baby” didn’t oblige. She waited until the next day. We didn’t call her George, or even Georgina.
Anyway, the weather was quite a lot warmer on St. George’s Day 44 years ago. That was also true of the year of the pandemic. We may have been suffering a lockdown but we had a very nice spring and those of us fortunate enough to have a garden, even if only a small one, were able to sit out in the sunshine. Today is (so far anyway) quite bright and sunny but cold. When I ran this morning I left my gloves behind. That was a mistake!
But now I have optimistically hung washing on the line in the garden, hoping that the wind will blow it dry before the cold half-freezes it.
In today’s newspaper online was this story:
“Doctors in Gaza have saved a baby from the womb of her mother as she lay dying from head injuries sustained in an in Israeli airstrike. The girl was delivered via an emergency caesarean section at a hospital in Rafah.
The woman, Sabreen al-Sakani, was 30 weeks pregnant when her family home was hit by an airstrike. Her husband, Shoukri, and their three-year-old daughter, Malak, also died.
“We managed to save the baby,” Ahmad Fawzi al-Muqayyad, a doctor at the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah, told Sky News. “The mother was in a very critical condition. Her brain was exposed, so we saved one of the two.”
On Sunday the baby lay wriggling and crying in an incubator in the neonatal unit of the nearby Emirati hospital. The tag around her wrist bore her dead mother’s name.”
A feel-good story of sorts amidst all the horror. But what happens to babies like this one? In her case there is a grandmother who is prepared to take her once she can leave the hospital. Where her grandmother can take her to is another matter. Some people are returning to their “homes” but mostly this is just a space where a home used to be. And there are now so many orphans from this conflict.
In the United States students at Columbia University have been arrested for setting up a protest encampment. The university president said she requested NYPD clear the encampment as it “severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students”. However, during a news conference later that day, the NYPD commissioner, Edward Caban, said: “The students that were arrested were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever, and were saying what they wanted to say.”
Of course, it’s not just in the USA that such things are happening. Here too the right to protest has been restricted. So much for freedom of speech.
And let us not forget that St. George was not actually English. He was Turkish, I think and his mother was Palestinian.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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