It’s been another gloomy day here, but not raining and not particularly cold. I got up and ran round the village fist thing, stopping to chat with someone sweeping up leaves in his front garden. It seems I am an inspiration to him as he sees me run past his house most morning. Goodness! I have become a role model. Or maybe I’m just that mad woman who runs round the village.
Later I got myself organised and went off to the local small Tesco, to purchase odds and ends that I wouldn’t be able to buy at our village co-op store. Besides, the co-op is about to close for a month for refurbishment and as a result they’ve been running down supplies and their shelves have been getting emptier and emptier. While I was in the Tesco store my daughter phoned me; it turned put she was at my house drinking coffee. Did I want her or her partner to pick me up with my shopping? Well, yes! So I bought a few things I might not otherwise have bought as I was not going to have to carry it home on the bus.
My daughter and family had been to a birthday party, a triple party shared by three small children, the parent’s sharing the cost of hiring the indoor play centre. A good idea for the parents of the birthday children but, as my daughter said, it meant buying three birthday presents at one go. And what a way to start the weekend: 10.30 am in an indoor play centre with lots of over-excited children! Parenthood is not quite what it used to be.
In the mid-afternoon we went for a walk round the village, pretty much following my running route in reverse. Fortunately the small people seem to enjoy stomping round our bridle paths, looking for interesting dtuff in the woody areas.
I checked in with my Spanish sister yesterday evening, to see how things are in the area around Cádiz where she lives. She tells me they have had quite heavy rain but her town has not had the flooding that other parts of southern Spain have suffered. Here’s something from a news report on the ongoing clean-up operations:
“If past experience is any guide, the world’s reaction to the floods in Spain last week will be similar to that of motorway drivers at a crash scene: slow down, take in the horror, outwardly express sympathy, inwardly give thanks that fate picked someone else – and foot on the accelerator.
That is the pattern in our climate-disrupted era when extreme-weather catastrophes have become so commonplace that they risk being normalised. Instead of outrage and determination to reduce the dangers, there is an insidious sense of complacency: these things happen. Someone else is responsible. Somebody else will fix it.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The unnatural disaster in Spain – Europe’s deadliest flash floods in at least half a century – is evidence of two undeniable truths: the human-caused climate crisis is just starting to pick up ferocity, and we need to quickly kill the fossil fuel industry before it kills us.”
We can’t keep,hiding our head in the sand and hoping it all goes awa. Rather than locking up Just Stop Oil activists, we need to listen to what they have to say.
Then there is this:
““The situation unfolding in north Gaza is apocalyptic,” said a joint statement by UN agency heads, reports Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“The area has been under siege for almost a month, denied basic aid and life-saving supplies while bombardment and other attacks continue,” the heads of the humanitarian, health and other agencies said.
The entire Palestinian population in north Gaza is at imminent risk of dying from disease, famine and violence.”
Witnesses told AFP that Israeli warplanes twice hit Beit Lahia, adjacent to Jabalia, overnight.
Israel’s military on Saturday said dozens of militants were killed around Jabalia “in aerial and ground activity”.”
And this, which popped up somewhere on my social media:
“The Taliban’s new 'Vice and Virtue Order' has silenced Afghan women even more 🚫 banning them from speaking, singing, or even reciting the Quran in public. Women are being forced into complete invisibility. “
One way and another, we are messing up the world!
In an article about photos of US presidents, I came across this fact about Kennedy on the day he was assassinated:
“Kennedy was on his way to deliver a speech on political extremism, with lines Logevall believes to be prescient. “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason, or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy, with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.” “
They’ve not yet those swift and simple solutions.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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