This morning, quite early, I ran in relatively fine and mild weather. That’s almost a week without rain. The footpaths have been drying up nicely, making running a lot more pleasant.
Later in the morning I went out to go to the supermarket in Greenfield. As I was between buses I walked halfway there before stopping to wait for the bus. It was still a pleasant day.
Quite often on a Friday my daughter takes her smallest offspring to a toddler music group and then meets me and her 18 year old for coffee, or occasionally for lunch. Today our plans were scuppered because she had discovered a nail in her tyre. This is the second time in about three weeks that this has happened. She thinks that the workmen who have been replacing windows at the school where she works have left the carpark littered with debris that they have failed to clean up properly. So she has emailed her school’s site manager (formerly known as a caretaker) asking him to organise a proper sweep of the carpark. And she took the car to have its tyre fixed, leaving the small boy in the care of the 18 year old on her day off.
We did, however, arrange for her to collect me from the local Tesco at the end of the morning and we managed coffee and cake in a cafe near the supermarket. An extremely decadent chocolate cake was what we indulged in.
Perhaps because the weather has been ever so slightly springlike this week I was tempted by a tray of primroses for £3.50. At the checkout, the customer ahead of me commented that she had chosen to buy the same collection because they contain some blue and some yellow flowers, the colours of Ukraine! Her garden will show her solidarity. These gestures are everywhere. Our smallest granddaughter has spent some time colouring sunflowers blue and yellow in her primary school reception class.
Other such weirdly irrational things are happening, ostensibly in support of Ukraine, such as Cardiff Philharmonic cancelling a programme of Tchaikovsky’s music because they felt it was inappropriate at the present time. Tchaikovsky died, we should remember in 1893 - hardly a modern Russian, then!
The world is going crazy, possibly going to hell in a handcart. Friends and family are having arguments not so much about whether you can actually argue the Russian side of the Ukraine problem but about the media coverage of that problem and whether or not that coverage is biased. Part of the trouble is we’ve all got so used to being given information via social media as well as mass media that it’s hard to find anything that’s not biased
Horrible things are happening, there can be no denying it. All we can hope is that a peaceful resolution of some kind if arrived at and most of all, in the meantime, that we can respond to the situation with compassion. And certainly not with threats of violence against anyone who dares to look at the whole picture.
By the time my daughter and I had partaken of our coffee and decadent chocolate cake, it was time to collect the small girl from primary school, admiring the blue and yellow sunflowers in the reception class window. And it was starting to rain, almost certainly because I have bought those primroses to plant out in my garden!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
No comments:
Post a Comment