It’s another bright and sunny day. There was frost again first thing this morning and even a skim of ice on the puddles on my running route. It’s very disconcerting running past an almost frozen puddle while the sun on your back is really warm! Taking advantage of the sunshine, I have hung washing out to dry in the garden. What I really need to do is organise myself to tidy up the garden, get rid of the dead fern stems and trim back the bushes before they get too leafy and I can no longer see easily what needs snipping. Maybe later today … who knows?
We seem to have a shortage of bell-ringers in this country. As a rule this would not be of great importance but they want all the bells in the country to ring out on coronation day. An appeal has gone out for retired bell-ringers to come back to work, for volunteers to learn how to pull a bell-rope. Apparently it takes quite a long time to learn to do it properly. It”s not just a case of pull and release! I wonder if churches that use recorded bell-ringing will play their recordings on coronation day as well! And I wonder if Scotland and Wales, not forgetting Northern Ireland have the same problem. Indeed are they also expected to ring out all their bells?
Here’s a link to an article about women painters in New York, painting pictures of what they see from their high rise apartment windows.
I have always liked rooftop pictures. It’s interesting that the ones featured here all seem to have a flowering plant of some kind in the foreground - maybe to highlight the relentlessness of the urban sprawl.
Still in America, a school district in Florida has banned a book by Judy Blume, written as long ago as 1975. “Forever” deals with teenage relationships and sex - that’s probably what triggers the ban. I can’t help feeling the young teens the book is aimed at would be better learning about such things from Judy Blume than from porn on the internet.
Judy Blume said of book banning: “I thought that was over, frankly … I came through the 80s when book banning was really at its height. And it was terrible. And then libraries and schools began to get policies in place and we saw a falling-off of the desire to censor books.
“Now it is back, it is back much worse – this is in America. It is back so much worse than it was in the 80s. Because it’s become political.”
She’s probably right. There’s a move to “protect” young people, and the not so young for that matter, from disturbing stuff they might read.
Judy Blume said she was also worried about censorship in teaching. Florida introduced a bill last month that may limit discussion of menstruation before the sixth grade and the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is proposing to restrict conversation about gender identity and sexual orientation in schools.
“I mean, that’s crazy. That is so crazy,” Blume said. “And it is so frightening that I think the only answer is for us to speak out and really keep speaking out, or we are going to lose our way.
“I mean, there’s a group of mothers now going around saying that they want to protect their children. Protect them from what? You know, protect them from talking about things? Protect them from knowing about things?
And of course banning books won’t stop kids finding stuff on the Internet, which is a lot harsher and encourages anti-social behaviour. Here’s something columnists Arwa Mahdawi wrote:
“So this is embarrassing to admit, but, when I was a tween, I was obsessed with Bush. THE BAND! THE BAND! I adored the lead singer, Gavin Rossdale, and I assumed that one day the stars would align and I would marry him. (The stars made me gay instead.) I spent hours on the dial-up internet inhaling Bush-related content and I harboured a grudge against Gwen Stefani, because she was with Gavin, living my dream. What I didn’t do, however, was send Stefani any online threats. Mainly because 1) that would be unhinged; and 2) the internet was very slow and it wasn’t easy to instantly harass people online.”
The modern world is a hard place to grow up in.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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