As if to make up for about four days of sunshine, it rained during the night last might. Not just gentle rain either, it was what they call “la tromba” in Galicia, a real torrential downpour.
Phil cut the grass yesterday, beginning in the mid to late afternoon but giving up to wait until early evening as it was too hot to continue. Hisnolan was to give it another quick once-over this morning but now the grass will be too wet. So it goes.
Interesting language: the BBC calls the people who set fire to a police car and who injured policemen in Southport “protesters” but Yvette Cooper calls them “thugs”. Personally I’m with Yvette Cooper on this and would also call them “trouble-makers”, not really local,people but arriving by train at Chapel Street station and marauding through to Lord Street to cause chaos. Fortunately the local community seems to have rallied to tidy up the mess. The mother of Elsie, one of the children who was killed, had this to say: “This is the only thing that I will write, but please, please stop the violence in Southport tonight.
The police have been nothing but heroic these last 24 hours and they and we don’t need this.”
Although I grew up there, I don’t really consider Southport my home town any longer but it’s still upsetting to see such havoc.
And the misinformation campaign that had the disturbed young man who is accused of the stabbing described as an illegal immigrant, arrived last year on a boat, despite his being born in Cardiff, has spread closer to my home, with assaults on police headquarters at Newton Heath, and as far as London.
Here’s another linguistic oddity: someone shoots at Donald Trump and it’s an “assassination attempt” but when a Hamas leader is killed it’s called a “targeted killing” by the media. In the same way some people are “killed” by bombs and rocket attacks while Palestinian women and children just “die”.
There was a time, back when I was in my twenties, when we were full of hope that the world could only grow more tolerant and become a better place to live in. How do young people today see the world? Do they find that hope anywhere? And is my generation to blame for the chaos?
Maybe they can be cheered by our Olympic performance: “Great Britain was propelled into fifth position in the medal table, behind China, Japan, France and Australia, but ahead of South Korea and the USA”. Goodness! And so far I’ve not watched any of it, apart from unbelievable feats of gymnastics by Simone Biles which I’ve seen on Facebook.
All is not well in France either, of course. There is this from an article in the Guardian:
“he Paris Olympics opening ceremony was a stunning spectacle for global audiences, projecting an image of a proudly inclusive inclusive and festive France – even if the awkward truth is that, just a few weeks earlier, our country was on the verge of putting a racist far-right party into government. The ceremony’s various tableaux were presented as a triumphant display of our different cultures performed by artists of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds and genders, and fuelled by references to historical struggles against oppression.
But this unifying narrative introduced an Olympic and Paralympic Games that in reality are not all that inclusive.
A few days before the ceremony, Sounkamba Sylla, a French Muslim relay runner, was told that she would be banned from the event if she wore her headscarf. A compromise was finally found: she was allowed to wear a cap for the parade on the Seine – but her situation echoes a larger exclusion. France is the only Olympic participating country in the world to prohibit its female athletes from wearing hijabs.”
The world is a little crazy but …
Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!
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