Getting up on crisp, cold mornings. Eulogies and policy speeches. Educating girls. Graffiti art.

Mornings are growing decidedly chillier as September advances frightening quickly towards October. It becomes more difficult to persuade yourself to leave the cosy nest your bed has turned into. Maybe I should employ the 3–2-1 method described by the writer of this article. It sounds a bit like giving yourself a firm talking to: count down quickly 3-2-1, throw back the bed clothes and leap out of bed. Hmmm! It sounds fine in theory ….

Once you are up and about on days like today you realise how much you miss by not seeing the early hours. Again the theory sounds fine. I used to be a leap-out-of-bed-at-seven (or earlier) sort of person. Not any longer. Mind you, I also stay up later than I used to. I don’t think I can burn the candle at both ends any longer. 

Yesterday remained fine all day. We walked up the hill to Dobcross in the afternoon (still not very warm) sunshine. 

Today looks like being much the same, the sky looking rather like one of those Magritte clouds-in-the-sky pictures.

Out in the wider world tens of thousands of people packed into a football stadium for a memorial for Charlie Kirk. Despite Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika calling for peace and love and free speech in the world, it seems that Mr Trump made a rather hate-filled speech, more like a campaign speech than a eulogy. I find the whole Charlie Kirk phenomenon disturbing.

More disturbing though is this article about the education of girls in Afghanistan. Although some non-religious primary schools still exist, the numbers on roll are falling as there is more and more pressure to send girls to religious schools, madrasas, usually with financial, aid-related incentives. There they learn religious texts and rules, rules of nehavious and dress, but no maths of science. A sad situation?

I still find it strange that works by Banksy, basically high class, high quality graffiti have become coveted objects of value. Not that they are not of artistic value but putting a price on them changes the nature of the original protest. Here’s a link to an article about a row going on about works loaned to an exhibition in Italy.

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Sunshine after the rain. Broken trees. Recognising Palestine.

Yesterday I hesitated about getting up to run as I listened to rain on the skylight windows. When the noise stopped, virtue won and I got out of bed and organised myself to head out, with a lightweight running rain jacket … just in case. I ran my usual route without getting wet … apart from my feet as there were a lot of puddly places. I didn’t see any interesting wildlife, unlike the day before when two young deer ran across my path and I also saw the heron by the old millpond. 

It must have started raining not long after I got home because it was coming down steadily by the time I got out of the shower. And that was it for the day! Non-stop rain! It was still quite torrential when I went to bed, hammering down on the skylight windows. Some people pay good money for that kind of white noise to send them to sleep! 

This morning dawned bright and crisp and cold - down into single figure temperatures! My weather app promises a high of 12° today.

When I stepped out of the front door I was surprised to see what looked like a huge pile of leaves on the other side of the road.  

Closer examination showed it to be a huge branch broken off a tree. Looking high up into the tree you could see where it had broken off. Apparently it had been blocking the road late yesterday evening. I suppose it’s lucky that it didn’t land on someone’s car or a passing pedestrian. 

Everywhere I went there were lots of much smaller branches strewn around. I didn’t think it had been all that windy but there must have been enough to work with the rain and cause a little havoc.

On my regular running route the ford across the stream that runs into the River Tame was bursting out as it always does when it rains heavily. And the Tame itself was fairly bouncing along on it way through the village. But we have no flooding.

And the sunshine has made all the meet walking their dogs a good deal,more cheerful. It’s amazing what a bit if blue sky and sunshine can do!

I read that Mr Starmer is expected to announce the UK’s recognition of the state of Palestine this afternoon. Israel is opposed to the UK doing this, of course, and the United States is putting pressure on for Starmer to reconsider. So we wait to see what kind of announcement comes along later this afternoon. It would be good if we actually stopped helping arm Israel as well.

I hear that Portugal is also about to recognise Palestinian statehood. We shall see. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Some poetry about state banquets. Visits not allowed. Living in caves.

Well, Mr trump has come and gone, leaving behind advice that we should use the military to protect our borders from illegal immigrants! Former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy wrote a poem to mark his state visit:

How it glitters and shines, The Grand Service,

among the rocks and the rubble,

laid out on a breeze lock horseshoe table,

six crystal glasses per setting.

It took eight servants three weeks to polish -

silver coated in a thin layer of gold -

even the concrete dust in the air seems glamourised

and the ruins are decked in the uplifting flags of democracy.

To start, fillet of Dover sole filled with salmon mousse,

served on a bed of leeks with white wine sauce.

Poached Sandringham venison with truffles to follow,

then Key Lime Pie, and among the wines,

Chateau Pichon-Longueville Comtesse de Lalane, 1990.

Yum-yum. Let the trumpets sound on the bombsite

as the great and good pick their way through,

and a famished child peers through a bullet-hole in the wall. 

Thank you Carol Ann Duffy!

This article recounts the experience of a British MP, who happens to be a doctor and Jewish, who was denied entry into Israel with a humanitarian parliamentary delegation. He wanted to see for himself the state of health care but never even got into the country. He wonders what kind of threat he posed to the country which he had visited quite often in better times.

“It saddens me!” he wrote, “to say that Israel today seems to be a world away from the inclusive, pluralistic, open and democratic principles on which it was founded in 1948.”

There were some idealists involved back then, as well as some who already planned to expand.

Meanwhile, the emptying, and ultimate destruction, of Gaza City continues apace. Aid workers have been warmed that the only hospitals in Gaza are protected from attack. The cynic in me wonders if even hospitals really are protected. Other places, aid centres and such are not safe, apparently. 

Israeli officials are reported to have that said they were preparing a “humanitarian zone” in the overcrowded, underdeveloped al-Mawasi coastal area in southern Gaza by building new aid distribution sites nearby, supplying electricity to desalination plants, providing some water and allowing in more aid. So aid of sorts is getting through but one reprt says that a high proportion of trucks are commercially operated and are bringing in items such as soft drinks and snacks that are not nutritious but expensive.

All in all, a mess!

Maybe we need a new definition of humanitarian! 

In Matera, Basilicata, Italy, tourists can visit the ‘sassi’, ancient cave dwellings dug into the rock. People apparently lived there as early as the year 7000 BC. Now they are a World Heritage site.

In Petra, Jordan, there are similar cave dwellings. Famous for its rock-cut architecture and water conduit systems, Petra is also called the "Rose City" because of the colour of the sandstone from which it is carved. This site was also inhabited as early as 7000 BC. It’s one of the Mew Seven Wonders of the World, is a UNECSO World Heritage Site and receives close to a million visitors each year. The trouble is that there are people still living there who don’t want to leave. Here’s a link to an article about it. 

It’s odd how we always assume that making people leave their old traditional way of life and conform to our standards is necessarily a good thing! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!

Families - here and in conflict zones. The art that comes from conflict zones. “Fight clubs”. And “leaves on the line”.

On Thursdays I collect the two youngest grandchildren from school and we catch a bus to my house where their mother joins us and we all have scrambled eggs before she gives her father a lift to chess club with his various bits of equipment - computer, data-projector, seemingly everything but the kitchen sink. It’s become a family tradition. 

Yesterday Granddaughters Number One and Number Two joined us after they finished work and it turned into yet another big, friendly family meal. Over the summer months, with longer evenings, when this has happened we have gone for an evening stroll together when my daughter returns after taking Phil to chess club. It’s going dark earlier now so instead we spent time last night watching bats flitting about in the garden - the sun sets earlier but yesterday evening was surprisingly mild. 

We are fortunate to be able to do such family things together.

Here’s a photo that tells a different sort of story: families forced to flee from Gaza City to what is surprisingly labelled a ‘humanitarian’ zone!

And here are some facts culled from newspaper reports:

• More than a quarter of a million people have been displaced from Gaza City in the last month, according to figures from the UN, with tens of thousands more forced to flee makeshift homes and shelters daily in the face of a new Israeli offensive.
• More than 140 world leaders will arrive in New York next week for the annual United Nations general assembly summit, which will be dominated this year by the future of the Palestinians and Gaza. One world leader who will miss the gathering is Mahmud Abbas, the Palestinian president who Washington denied US visas to attend, along with his officials.
• The US once again has vetoed a UN security council resolution that had demanded an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the release of hostages. It also expressed alarm about a recent famine report and Israel’s expanding offensive in Gaza City. The 14 other members of the United Nations’ most powerful body voted in favor of the resolution Thursday

Marwan Makhoul is a Palestinian poet, born in 1979 in the village of al-Boquai’a, Upper Galilee, to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. He works in engineering as a managing director of a construction company. He has several published works in poetry, prose and drama. Here is one of his poems:

“In order for me to write poetry

That isn’t political

I must listen to the birds

And in order to hear the birds

The warplanes need to be silent”

I keep coming across examples of Palestinian artwork, amazingly bright and colourful, like this one:

Meanwhile, I’ve also been reading about neo-Nazi ‘fight clubs’ popping up all over the world. They are described as ‘a loose collective of neo-Nazi mixed martial arts groups that gather at local gyms and parks to train, tapping into existing gangs of white nationalists or adjacent organisations.’ Apparently ‘global authorities view them as perhaps one of the most organized and pernicious domestic terrorism threats, emanating from far-right political ideologies.’ And it seems they are using the death of Charlie Kirk as a kind of rallying call for recruitment to such clubs. Scary stuff. 

Perhaps the fact that there is an organisation called the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism says it all about how sad and serious things have become. How is it that in the 21st century we need such an organisation? However, here is something a friend sent me: 

In contrast, I want to finish on a lighter note. We’re at that time of year when trains can be delayed by leaves on the line. Our railway network stretches for 20,000 miles and has to cope with about 500 billion leaves each year. Who counts them? I wonder. There are special leaf-removal trains. The latest addition to that fleet has been named, following a public vote, “Ctrl Alt Deleaf”.  Other shortlisted suggestions  were “Leaf-Fall Weapon”, “Pulp Friction” and “The Autumn Avenger”.

Life goes on, stay safe and well, everyone!

Thinking of erosion. And immigrants. And celebrating strong people

Running around this morning, I noticed how muddy the footpaths have become again after a week of intermittent rain. I’d grown used to them being dry and dusty. There’s a point on one of my regular footpaths which was badly eroded right at the start of the year when the path was so flooded that parts of it were hollowed out. The dips and hollows and even deeper holes remain. Clearly these footpaths are not a priority for the local council. There’s even a section where the path is in severe danger of sliding into one of the small ponds that feed onto the larger old millpond.

Then I found this article in this morning’s Guardian about a Scottish village which is in danger of sliding into the sea. Almost everywhere we seem to fight against nature’s way of changing things. Here has always been coastal erosion. The sea steals coast on one side of out small island and seems to deposit it on the other. A form of evolution, I suppose.

Coincidentally, in a programme we accidentally / serendipitously caught the latter half of on last night’s television, the artist David Hockney talked to Melvyn Bragg (both considerably younger than they are now) about a house in California which appeared in a number of his paintings but which has now been swallowed onto the sea. 

It’s interesting to see how David Hockney experimented, and still  experiments in his old age, with different representational styles. We watched him using photography, old style printed photos put together to present things from different perspectives, a mind of forerunner of things he would try later with the computer and with the iPad. Fascinating stuff!

Apparently it’s National Hispanic Heritage Month (Mes Nacional de la Herencia Hispana) in the USA. This is a period from September 15th to October 15th in the United States for recognizing the contributions and influence of Hispanic Americans to the history, culture, and achievements of the country. 

Considering the policy’s their current president has been bringing into play to remove immigrants, and in the light of all the fuss about his visit to the UK, maybe he should be reminded of such things.

Maybe he needs reminding that almost all the people of the USA are from immigrant families. One such is Joan Baez. Here’s a reminder of her story:

“Joan Baez has chalked up her passion for social justice to her upbringing. Her father was a Mexican-born physicist, her mother a Scottish-born pacifist. Her parents were liberal intellectuals passionate about non-violence and raised Baez and her two sisters in the Quaker faith. 

“I was eight when my parents became Quakers. The American Friends Service Committee is the active wing of the Quakers which goes to various places in the world and does good things for numbers of people. When I was fifteen, I was out demonstrating with my dad and mom and family against the bomb shelters. I’m sure my activism came from the family.” – Joan Baez

 Because of her father’s profession, Joan traveled all over the world. Her exposure to so many cultures and communities gave her a unique perspective on her ethnic identity, which changed depending on where she lived. 

Throughout the years, Joan has relayed stories of being called the N-word by a racist neighbor in Clarence, New York, when he caught a glimpse of her darker skin tone. She tells another story about how she witnessed school segregation between white and Mexican students first hand when her family lived in Redlands, California.

It is experiences like these that shaped Joan’s strong sense of right and wrong, as well as her strong pull to act on those beliefs. For Joan, music became the primary vehicle in which she could promote her activism. 

"You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now." - Joan Baez 

In 1968, Joan was arrested and jailed for barricading the door at a military induction center. She explained she was protesting America’s practice of drafting men to fight in the Vietnam War. 

As Joan sat in the cell, a man named Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to visit her and thanked her for her anti-draft efforts. Joan and Dr. King developed a close relationship, and Joan continued to support him and his vision of peaceful protesting.

There are dozens of similar stories like this the people she met, the historic events she was a part of. Stories of her singing at the 1963 March on Washington, standing in the fields alongside Cesar Chavez during the “Bloody Summer” of 1973, or most recently, making an appearance at the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016.”

She said:

“If people have to put labels on me, I'd prefer the first label to be human being, the second label to be pacifist, and the third to be folk singer.” 

“I think music has the power to transform people, and in doing so, it has the power to transform situations - some large and some small.” 

She’s still making her voice heard. 

We need to remember and celebrate such people while they are still here. After all, we have just lost Robert Redford! 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!