I think we might have finished celebrating birthdays for the time being. There seem to have been rather a lot of them in April. Yesterday, 1st of May, we belatedly sang happy birthday to Grandson Number One, who was 20 on Tuesday. I made a cake, of course. When I told Granddaughter Number Four that I didn’t actually have 20 candles to put on his cake and that he would now have to be an adult and just have one token candle, she expressed some concern: “You do have 9 candles, though, don’t you, Grandma?” She was clearly thinking ahead to September when her own 9th birthday comes around again. I do have nine candles!
So we had a bit of a birthday tea, sang happy birthday, watched him blow out his one candle and then went for a family stroll round the village. By then it was around 7.30 but it was still very warm. I hear that the temperature reached 29.3 in South London. The temperature wasn’t that high here but there was a definite feeling of summer: that stillness that you get on long hot days.
Today began cooler and cloudy but the sun was coming out by midday. We also have a cool breeze.
A couple of months ago Israel imposed a strict blockade on Gaza, allowing no food, water, medical supplies to enter the country, before beginning airstrikes once again, breaking the ceasefire. Last night, in the middle of the night drones attacked a humanitarian aid-ship headed for Gaza, disabling it in international waters off Malta. The ship belonged to the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. Here’s a link to an article about the midnight attack.
At one point the report tells us that ‘a previous Freedom Flotilla launched from southern Turkey in 2021 ended in bloodshed when Israeli forces stormed the Mavri Marmara vessel, killing 10 people and wounding 28, a fact that seems to have disappeared into a kind of memory hole, conveniently forgotten so that we could regard current events as something new.
Here’s a short recap about that occasion:
“The Gaza flotilla raid was a military operation by Israel against six civilian ships of the "Gaza Freedom Flotilla" on 31 May 2010 in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. Nine of the flotilla passengers were killed during the raid, with thirty wounded. Ten Israeli soldiers were wounded, one seriously. The exact sequence of events is contested, in part due to the IDF's confiscation of the passengers' photographic evidence. The flotilla, organized by the Free Gaza Movement and the Turkish Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, was carrying humanitarian aid and construction materials, intending to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.”
The problem isn’t new. It’s been going on for decades.
Here’s a link to an article about ancient Indian gems up for auction. There seem to be two things for discussion here: how right is it to put up for auction precious things that were stolen in the colonial past? and, is there not a certain amount of superstition in believing the gems to be “imbued with the spirit of Buddha”?
Something else stolen is music (and arts in general, for that matter) in state schools. Here’s an article about Sheku Kanneh-Mason, a cellist and one time winner of the BBC Young Musician of the Year award. He tells about how his state school in Nottingham was full of music when he was a pupil there. Then the school was subsumed into a multi-academy trust, funding cuts followed and the focus on music was lost. The cellist himself, though, donated his £3,000 BBC Young Musician of the Year award to the school so that cello lessons could continue.
If we lose the arts from our state schools we will deprive masses of children of access to all sorts of things and we deprive the country of possible future artists, musicians, actors, writers and so on. There’s more to education than reading, writing and ‘rithmetic’.
Judging by the grammar in this extract from a recent report of a holocaust memorial ceremony, I’m not aomsure we’re doing very well on the reading and writing bit:
“The delegation took part in the international commemorations at the main Obelisk where Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner spoke, and both her and Lord Coaker laid wreaths.”
Oh dear!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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