The mornings are getting cooler: 10° this morning as against 17° or more just last week. Someone told me when I was out and about earlier today that there was frost at 6 o’clock this morning. It may be getting cooler in the morning but I don’t quite believe tales of frost just yet.
I could almost feel sorry for Keir Starmer. Will his people stop letting him down? Now he has had to sack Peter Mandelson as US ambassador. Can Mandelson be ‘unlorded’? I wonder. I’ve long been suspicious of this business of making people lords and dames, sometimes seemingly at the drop of a hat. When they let you down and are revealed to be mired in scandal, is there a way of taking their lordship or dameship away from them?
There’s a possibly rather idealistic bit of me that says that politicians and clerics and kings should be pure as the driven snow. After all, even if they have no skeletons in their cupboards someone will surely invent them. So if you have ambitions to become important in some public arena you need to be sure that there no scandal attributable to you.
I read that the choir of Bangor Cathedral has been suspended for performing an “entirely inappropriate” piece protesting about job losses during holy communion. It seems there has already been scandal attached to the cathedral because of “a culture of excessive drinking, sexual promiscuity, bullying, bad language and inappropriate banter”. Goodness!
The choir sang a specially composed “Canticle of Indignation” as clergy distributed wafers and wine during communion. At the end of the piece, the choir silently walked out. This was provoked by the cathedral announcing that five out of eight members of staff were at risk of redundancy due to financial pressures. The music director’s hours also were to be reduced. Not a happy church then!
The author of the “inappropriate piece” wrote on Facebook that he was “honoured to be in the same position as Banksy in having my art publicly censured”. He added: “There is a long history of protest through art, even through church music … and I am proud to be part of that. One of the clearest signs of tyranny is its desire to silence dissent and opposition, and that can never be tolerated.”
Well! Well!
The Banksy art in question, by the way, has been reduced, after much scrubbing, from this
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to this
Some people have commented that it’s reduced form is a new and better artistic expression of repression.
In the USA someone I have never heard of, Charlie Kirk, was shot dead yesterday while addressing an audience at the campus of Utah Valley University. It turns out he was a right-wing political activist, author and media personality (the latter a dubious ‘occupation’ if ever there was one!) who defended the right to bear arms. So it’s perhaps ironic that he met his end that way.
Mr Trump says flags should be flown at half mast in his honour. Both Democrats and Republicans have condemned the shooting. Another USA citizen I’ve not heard of, Gabrielle Giffords, a former Democratic congressperson from Arizona, who was shot and suffered a severe brain injury in 2012 and is now a passionate advocate for preventing gun violence, said: “Democratic societies will always have political disagreements but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence.”
It may be too late for that wish.
Meanwhile the violence and the forced movement of large numbers of people in Gaza continue. Here is a link to an article in which the Guardian’s reporter in Gaza describes the dilemma facing her family and others, many hungry, penniless and without transport. She describes at one point how her father set off on his bicycle to see if he could find a place for his family to move to. During this search he stayed with a friend in southern Gaza, the area where people from Gaza City have been told/ordered to move to. She tells us:
“But within half an hour, four heavy airstrikes hit a couple of hundred metres away, in the eastern outskirts of the “humanitarian area”. These attacks filled my father with fear. How can the Israeli army tell us to evacuate Gaza City for our safety while it bombs the very places it wants us to go?”
Her question is one we cannot answer but it keeps being asked!
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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