This is all wholly personal.
It always has been but more than ever , just what I think. All written in advance because I am about to go down the tubes or up a flue and I wanted to offer something before my worst fears are recognized and accursed technology takes a bite out of me.
Likes for annalog have been absolutely heart lifting, enormous thanks.
Money runs through the hands of Sarah Ferguson,
erstwhile wife of Prince Andrew, like water. She has never had enough money to live as mythology suggests she might. So , whatever the greater ramifications are, she was nice to the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein because he gave her money. She has done a lot of things for money, most of them worked only for a short time and financial difficulties occurred, occurred and re-occurred. No dough. Heaven knows what she spends it on.
The Prime Minister
may have all sorts of moral and ethical ideas about Israel and Palestine but I suggest that recognizing the state of Palestine was actually a sop to his younger MPs, who want to be seen to be being effective in their first Parliament and who themselves or their constituents are largely swayed by the horrors of Gaza. Of course it isn’t as simple as that – but it is. It is called realpolitik and I looked the word up before I used it.
I have been very interested to see two US clinical psychologists talk a great deal of sense: one working in media and clinically (Dr. Martha Deiros Collado, who made the point about the addiction of anxiety I quoted) and Dr. Marc Brackett who has founded a department of emotional intelligence at Yale, whose programmes are used to some small extent in this country – and about teaching children to express and negotiate their emotions. The Princess of Wales rates him.
And for both of them – in the very limited amount I have read – the elephant in the room is parents.
We increasingly ask teachers to do what we don’t or can’t do or just don’t want to do ourselves – just as we all too often ask the police to act as interim medical aides or social workers – and complain mightily when due to sheer lack of man and woman power , they can’t and won’t.
Running standing still means none of this is new. It’s where we are. The names of the commentators may change and how they package their ideas may have a new title but bottom line, this is where we are. Both of the two I speak of know we have to start somewhere and neither of the two I refer to think difference can be made easily. Hooray.
President Trump has his views. The driver on the way to hospital was a former Afghani farmer and he talked very intelligently about mass production of food and abuse of hormones up to and including the imbalance of the genders: more women than men
because of the hormones in mass produced food, especially meat. This is not new but people won’t think about it. This is not an attack on farmers, I am not a closet vegan. But for the majority of us who like a varied diet he talked a lot of sense. And we have to keep on talking about it because people won’t think. Nobody can think for you, you have to do it for yourself.
And something happened to me last week, that I have seen on film and read about but have never experienced before. On the bus were a couple, Middle Eastern, neither dripping with money nor starrily lovely. And she was wearing a dark grey roll necked sweater. Not £800 ‘ worth of cashmere – but it is rare to see a woman from there in a dark colour. And we had already grinned at each other.
Getting off the bus, I said “How nice you look in that colour ! And I am old, I am allowed to say this…” And she took my hand. Which she held gently and lightly throughout a brief conversation with both of them. So for those few minutes not running, not standing still, just breathing the sweet air of kind difference – which is currently pretty rare.
Annalog 