There is that wisdom which says something to the effect that you have to recognise unhappiness to know when it ends
and you are happy – but the relentlessness of the turning world is all around us. I sat with a woman friend in a restaurant where I ate a piece of halibut which was a thing of wonder and drank a Bloody Mary. That’s what we had – one plate each, shared fried zucchini and a drink – no multiples of white wine, no moody puddings. And she talked mostly about her husband, to whom she was married long and miserably, and to whom after a divorce and the love of her life dying of a heart attack 10 years in, she returned (don’t ask). He is now deeply uncomfortable in terminal illness. And the sun shone.
It feels terrible to be sipping spring
while Ukraine is being bombed into tomorrow morning and for the record, I wept when I saw the destruction in Syria and cursed Assad. I am not blind to Vladolf’s sense that deeds speak louder than words, what price war crimes on a man who doesn’t admit to making war ? And the contradictions never end.
You do better if you live a small life, not a narrow existence but something in human scale, accepting that, while you may think about all sorts of things, thinking is all you will do. And the more intricately busy the world gets, the more important it is to understand how various it is. And your choices, whether made through a process of thought or apathy are real
and they all have costs. That you may work in media (40 years in print, radio and TV) and never have thought of marketing to the 2 to 5 year demographic (yes the tinies)
images already made popular through YouTube (see Moonbug) via your phone.
I am not keen on seeing the screen offered to the very young. I believe that the size of the screen makes a difference in perception. And if I am going to read an article about Moonbug, I want them to read David Smith’s The Big Screen. If the related industries thought the founders’ acquisition of rights to material already in the public domain wasn’t relevant – and it proved to be just the opposite with lots of lovely money – I want them to read the history of the screen and think a bit. It may not be relevant now but I bet it will be.
Dov served in the Israeli army through a war and wound up one morning in the Negev,
his best friend dead, thinking “I don’t want this. I want to be at the beach , eating ice cream, looking at pretty girls.” He called his country “the land of blood and orange juice” – it shocked me. I think I imagined the blood in the orange juice and that disturbed me even more.
This morning before the convenience store opened – always late on Sundays – I flicked on tv (unusual for me) to hear an ITV reporter speaking to a women of her own age (mid thirties) about being trapped in one of the Ukraine cities, under bombardment and asking “So tell me what is your life like on a day to day basis ?” That’s a quote. And I switched off. I am not sure what the blow by blow account of a war in real time will do to you,
but it won’t do me any good.
I can’t fight and my techie skills aren’t sophisticated enough to be useful. Rolling bandages and knitting socks is a bit old hat and anyway this incursion unrolled so fast there was no time for either, even if they had been relevant. The British government that is allegedly dealing with the national interest in this situation, isn’t a government in whom I repose much confidence about anything but that’s who we’ve got. The good news is that the European countries (including us) appear to be speaking to each other again with rather more clarity and good intent than for the last several years. Maybe we can keep the blood out of the orange juice. I hope so.
Annalog 