I spoke to my son last night. We don’t speak often enough as he lives in Buckinghamshire and is very busy and we live in outer Manchester and are not quite as busy as he is but still find lots of things to occupy us. I thought it would be an idea to speak to him before we head off for Portugal at the start of next week. I texted him to ask him to call when it was convenient. So he chose a quiet moment while his wife and his good friend were coordinating sleeping arrangements for three ten year old girls.
His good friend Chris and the good friend’s daughter were at his house for the evening. In fact the daughter was going to stay the night, as was another friend of my granddaughter. A brave pair, my son and his wife, accepting to have three ten undoubtedly excited year old girls sleeping in their house. His good friend should have been on a skiing holiday with his wife and children but at the last moment they had realised that the ten year old daughter’s passport was on the point of expiring. So his wife and eight year old son have gone skiing and he has remained at home with his daughter! Oops! The best laid plans and all that sort of thing!
We checked out passports recently, having heard some horror stories of people being turned away at security in the airport because of confusion over passport issue and expiry dates. Ours are fine. We won’t be refused right to travel … not this time anyway.
I keep hearing reports of European passport holders with settled status here in the UK having passport problems when they travel to their country of origin to visit family and in particular when their passports are due for renewal. Just a little Brexit problem!
And now there are things to do with costs of bringing food stuffs into this country. We’ll be back to British beef andYorkshire pudding! No more exotic un-British ingredients!
Here’s another bit of Brexit stuff, from a source I have forgotten:
“It’s not often you get a really good laugh on the daily BBC Politics Show but there was one today. Following a discussion about the UK Farmers protest, Headmaster, historian and author Sir Anthony Seldon asked the other three panellists, (Tory, Labour & LibDem) “What benefits have been forthcoming due to leaving the EU” i.e. Brexit. To be fair the LibDem lady said there were none. The Tory and the Labour MPs gave an excruciating example of a certain logic which explained no advantages of Brexit into stating how good it was. In other words there are no benefits at all from Brexit but we will continue to pretend that there are.”
So it goes.
Now for something more serious. From Media Lens, there is this:
“Five British prime ministers have stopped arms to Israel in the past, including Margaret Thatcher when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, and Tony Blair who stopped the export of UK weapons that could be used to suppress Palestinians during the Second Intifada in 2002. But not Rishi Sunak, so far, in 2024.”
(Who would have thought I might praise Mrs Thatcher?)
Media Lens points out that we are all complicit in what is going on in Gaza. Well, not you and I, not so much the man in the street, not personally, but our governments and our media.
“British Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who spent over a month treating patients at Al-Shifa and Al-Ahli Baptist hospitals in Gaza, told Amy Goodman in a Democracy Now! interview:
‘I blame the Western journalists, who perpetuated the narrative that militarized the [Al-Shifa] hospital as a justifiable and an acceptable target to the Israelis. These genocide enablers, these Western journalists, from the very beginning, peddled these stories that the Israelis were feeding them about Shifa being on top of this massive complex of a command-and-control center. And their job was to enable the genocide to take place. And the genocide can only take place if the health system is destroyed.’”
They point protective Israel-defensive headlines, such as this from the New York Times after thenWorld Central Kitchen vehicles were attacked:
‘Founder of World Central Kitchen says several workers killed in Gaza airstrike’
No mention of Israel. Middle East historian Assal Rad said:
‘Covering up Israel’s crimes enables them to commit more, name the attacker.’
Headlines such as “Deaths of Gazans desperate for food prompt fresh call for ceasefire” and ‘Gaza could face a famine by May’ make it appear that this is some kind of naturally-occurring disaster, on a par with earthquakes and tsunamis.
We need to accept responsibility.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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