A2Z 2020 Challenge

L is for Love…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Love is in the air
For young lovers in lockdown
While lost loves
Dream of love locked up
Not locked down.

Love is the drug
That takes you to a different place
Consumes you from within
Tricking your cells
To accept false flags
Before breaking your heart.

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Love the time we have
Hate the loss of freedom
Saving money because we can’t spend it
Losing money because we can’t earn it.

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Let me be a survivor
Don’t wanna be a deep-sea diver
Or win a million fivers
Just let me live and love a little longer.

The one who loves you
Hides in plain sight 
You never gonna feel its bite
Covid 19 –
Who loves ya baby…

——————————————————————

Love is in the air
John Paul Young

Love is the drug
Roxy Music

It’s a thin line between love and hate
Annie Lennox

I hope that I don’t fall in love
Juliet Turner

The one who loves you
The Divine Comedy

K is for Karma…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!


Karma – (in Hinduism and Buddhism) the sum of a person’s actions in this and previous states of existence, viewed as deciding their fate in future existences.

There are many people who think, and many more who are wondering, whether the Covid 19 crisis is Karma for the human race, whether the fate of our present state and future existence has been determined by our heretofore actions in regard to the way we live in and treat this world. The definition at the top of the page (courtesy of Wikipedia), uses the word deciding in relation to future existences, and it is, of course, referring to the lives, deaths and reincarnations of individuals. You may have noticed that in connection with the collective fate of the human race, I have used the words “determined by”. The religious use of Karma implies that some divinity weighs the action ( for which karma is the Sanskrit word) of a person’s life and as we say in the west – “As you sow, so shall you reap!”

Does Karma always work?

It is clear in life, that neither the good nor the bad always get their just desserts, and whether anyone becomes demoted to a lower animal in the next life, or the opposite, nobody in this life can actually say. Most religions use the threat of some kind, karmic judgment or heaven v. hell, to try to cajole their congregations into behaving better and without intending to be too cynical, the odd natural disaster, especially ones that have a leveling effect on society, does not go amiss in helping religion in its quest. Ironic then that in this present crisis, those western religions at least – I can’t speak for others – who have been languishing with ever diminishing congregations, have had to lock their doors due to social isolating and are unable to offer comfort in the hour of need – at least not in person. They are asking themselves whether their role is going to be even more diminished once this crisis is over, and with many of the elderly members who have remained staunch attendees having “gone to meet their maker” according to their beliefs, churches are asking themselves how they can reinvent themselves now, in new and perhaps digital ways.

Mind you, there have been some religious people who have brandished their belief in God/Yahweh/Allah as a shield which they are sure will protect them – bible belt evangelists going about their business and their worship as usual, Moslems queuing up to lick shrines and as to Yaakov Litzman, Health Minister for Israel, well he said “all LGBT+ people are sinners” (in other words, the virus is a judgment on them) but has since tested positive for Covid-19, his wife has also tested positive for the disease and, being a cabinet minister, he has caused Benjamin Netenyahu and several top government officials to go into quarantine. All those other virus defying groups will probably also learn the error in their thinking.

Free Will and Karma

Lest you think I am wantonly attacking religion, let me tell you an old joke. A flood was building and as the waters rose around the church, a parishioner ran in to the priest and begged him to come away to higher ground. “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” The waters surrounded the church and a boat was sent to collect the priest but he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!” As the waters rose the priest climbed up to the roof and a helicopter came to rescue the priest but still he said: “No, no friend – I am safe, God will protect me!”. During the night, the waters washed the priest off the roof and he drowned. Standing before St. Peter at the gates of heaven, the priest asked: “Why did God not save me?” At which, God, who hears everything, rushed up fuming. “What do you mean not save you, you idiot?” God shouted, “I sent a man, a boat and a helicopter to save you!”

The moral of this story is that even for those who believe in God, he has given free will so that you may act well or badly (otherwise there would be no point in judgment) and that means you have to act well and wisely and not expect God to save you from folly of your own making.


The Rationalist’s position…

I don’t believe in God, but I very much believe in free will and folly of our own making, in people who act well and those who act badly and I believe (see C is for Covid 19) that microscopic viruses which are arguably not even alive, have no intelligence and certainly no moral judgment against any of their victims. The very fact and mystery of their pointless existence could be enough to cause a man of faith to question his beliefs…

So can Rationalists, Materialists, Atheists, can they have any truck with the concept of Karma? Very much so – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” is simply cause and effect you can’t get much more “scientific” than that! If you mess up your planet by unrestrained growth, wanton use and waste of resources, unrestrained pollution, you will find yourself in the shit. If you sell live, wild animals that have been infected by disease-carrying bats in a world that is crisscrossed with the airways of the global village, you will get crossover virus events that sooner or later will become pandemics. No moral judgment involved, no Gaia is punishing us with a restorative crisis – just scientifically explainable inevitability!

That is, however, Karma, the consequences of actions chosen – “As you sow, so shall you reap!” So as I have said before in these pages, as we grope towards exit strategies form this crisis – there are past actions to be reassessed, choices to be made,, new ways to be formulated…

J is for Judgment

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

An open letter to Boris Johnson


Dear Prime Minister Johnson

or may I call you Boris since you are now to be perceived as one of the people,” in it together”? I wish you well on your recovery from Covid 19 and I despise those who have made political capital out of your illness and I wish you no harm as a fellow human being.

Whilst I disagree strongly with decades if not centuries of the policies of your party, I know you are not responsible for all that, but you have willingly picked up the mantle. On a personal level, l am given to understand that your position on Brexit had more to do with seeking the highest office in politics rather than conviction and now you have achieved it. Your personal approval ratings are high as the jolly man who promises to “Get Brexit Done!” But this pandemic means that all bets are off, Brexit almost irrelevant for now except that the benefits of international co-operation have never been more needed or more obvious. Furthermore, now that you have experienced the very best treatment by a National Health Service which your party has done so much to wear down under your plans – to change it into an American for-profit system – I hope you have seen the results of those policies, understaffed, under-resourced, yet offering heroic service to the nation in the present crisis.

I hope when you return to work after the rest which your father has prescribed for you, that you’ll see things in a different light – you may question the wisdom of your earlier judgments. I know you will be surrounded by a cabinet full of the people who still believe in austerity as the default position, the same people who pressured this country into Brexit and they will not be happy to see you turn your ideas around but I beg you to do so for it is not possible for this country or indeed the world to return to things as they were. Do you endorse your stand-in having said, whilst you were ill, that “this is not the time to be thinking of a raise in salaries for nurses.” Surely you of all people must now agree that there can be no better time…

You may wish to emulate the man I understand to be your hero – Winston Churchill – a man who made many errors of judgment in his career before finding his ultimate role as leader of the country in a time of war, much as you are now, However, remember, despite having led us through the war successfully, Churchill was disappointed to lose the election in a landslide to Labour after the war, because the people knew by then, that they were entitled something better and they rejected those who traditionally felt entitled. This is how the Welfare State was born and the time has come for the government to renew the Social Contract and rebuild the Welfare State for the people, or as Labour would have it “For the Many Not the Few”. After your election victory you realized you had to look after the so-called Labour red wall seats or else you might lose at the next election. None of us could have foreseen that this crisis would spring up so quickly on your watch, but here it is – your Churchill moment. How are you going to play it? You have the chance to be an outstanding leader if you dare to take a radical position as the times call for. Or you can just attempt to restore things as they were with the massive gaps between rich and poor. But will you then succeed at the next election with an electorate who have had unlimited time to understand and consider how we got to this place in such a poor state of preparedness and to watch how you manage to deal with the crisis.

Please! Go for blue-sky thinking, out-of-the-box thinking, make judgments based on new criteria, try something different – make no mistake that is what is required in what will be a new world order.

PS Your senior advisor – the self-styled Disruptor, Dominic Cummings – is he the right man for the job now. Breaking things is so much easier than trying to fix them and Covid 19 has surely given him as much disruption as even he could wish for -just saying…

I is for Internationalism v. Isolationism.

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Lying in bed this morning, trying to think of a subject for the A to Z Challenge 2020, I had a sudden insight that I had never quite grasped before with such clarity. The right-wing Prime Ministers, Presidents, and Dictators, who have slid to power on the back of inflamed Nationalist sentiments, the scapegoating of “the other”, are against Internationalism because they want total control within their fiefdoms – as much as they can grasp without showing their true colours. What were the first things that Donald Trump did after getting elected? He put travel bans on Muslims and made a start on the wall he had used to get elected by whipping up the very people he and his kind routinely neglect. The isolationism of Trump’s US has been ramped up with ill-conceived trade wars – especially with China – this is quintessential Isolationism.



Let us not forget, in this time of distraction, Brexit, pushed by the likes of uber-rich, hedge-fund manager and Member of Parliament Rees-Mogg. His hedge fund no doubt made a huge killing betting on the outcome of Brexit – betting against the good of the country. The European Union is an example of Internationalism – it was set up in the aftermath of the Second World War with the aim, through close cooperation in all areas, trade, education, crime prevention, scientific research, and the freedom of movement for work or simply to live somewhere else. This aspect of the EU was completely ignored by Brexiteers who saw only a body that imposed rules which make it harder for them to exploit society, rules on human rights, on environmental and food standards.

Now, brought together by a greater danger, the Covid 19 pandemic, we are seeing unprecedented international cooperation – at least in the scientific community but whilst we are all distracted, there is a creeping seizure of “emergency” powers by many governments and the question is, will they be relinquished at the end of all this – they are the ones who will decide when it is at an end in any case…

There have been many ridiculous conspiracy theories about the virus and its origins and you may think that these warnings about power-grabs fall into the same league, but if you do take them ln any way, seriously, here is a link to Open Democracy who take these things very seriously and offer a comprehensive list of the implications for democracy around the world.

Sorry to offer more doom and gloom when the virus gives us enough to worry about here in the present, however, we need to think about how things will be on the other side of this pandemic and since the crisis has highlighted many inconvenient truths, the way austerity has run down the heroic National Health Service in Britain – softening it up for privatization US style – the complete and scandalous inadequacy of the “for profit” health service in the US or the way companies have denied the effectiveness of working from home for say, disabled people and which managers are now doing everywhere. People are questioning the way they have been made to live, in all sorts of ways and those on the right are terrified of where it will leave them if the people remember what they have learned including – Internationalism good for solving the crisis- Isolationism (on an International level though very definitely not the personal) bad…

Round Up 3 – Other blogs on the A to Z Challenge 2020

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As I work my way Though the list of participating blogs (I am up to 117 out of 510) looking for one’s that resonate with me, there are some which I metaphorically swipe whichever way it is, never having been on Tinder I wouldn’t know, in fairly quick order. I am not saying I will never read a site spreading Christian memes, or a personal genealogy quest but they would have to grab my attention in a pretty special way, instantly, either by conveying something about the person or something about the quality of their writing and this next one does that. Deborah Bayer at “Healers Write, Writers Heal” is journalling a physician’s journey into Alternative medicines following an encounter with cancer and for me, she scores on both counts – writing and personality.

This blog seems to have done the challenge for the last two years but although listed for 2020 doesn’t seem to be posting to theme – never mind I like it so its here – The Daily Parker.

Likewise “Life in the Third Dimension” the content and the writing and the personality coming through if not the Challenge posts…

H is for Happiness

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Happiness is a Warm Gun…Momma

This song penned by John Lennon is full of double-entendres. Lennon explained that he got the title from an article in a National Rifle Association magazine and he divided the song into three sections, “the Dirty Old Man”, “the Junkie”, and “the Gunman (Satire of ’50s R&R)”. By the last, he meant his sexual desire for Yoko Ono. That there are those for whom a literal warm gun is happiness, that some apparently find happiness in drugs whilst sexual love is yet another form of happiness shows what a complex thing is our “pursuit of Happiness”.

Getty Stock Images


Can we be happy all the time?

In the practice of Zen (and bearing in mind that those who know don’t say and those who say don’t know) it is said that there is constant attention to carrying out the simplest task of living with perfection. Does this bring happiness? It doesn’t sound full of highs nor lows and most people believe that without the lows, we cannot have the highs of happiness. If this present crisis is doing anything positive for us, it is to give us the chance of reflecting on what makes us happy, either because we are deprived of it, thinks lovers separated by social isolation, or because we are with the source of our happiness – oh to be young and in love and in lockdown – would you ever leave your bed! And no, its not just the young who are happy to be locked down with the one they love…
In nine months time, there is likely to be a baby boom whilst it is from the post-war baby boom that many of the victims of Covid  19 are drawn. Whilst this will undeniably reduce some of the future costs to health services for whom the preponderance of older patients, living longer with increasingly solvable but expensive conditions, it will give civil servants no happiness any more than the loss of migrants and the very poor who are also more susceptible to the disease will give no happiness except perhaps, to the vilest of right-wing politicians.
Meanwhile, we take our happiness in lockdown as we may…

Is Happiness an Instinct?

A friend of mine once told me how, during a search for a friend who it was thought, had drowned himself in a local lake, she went in a rowing boat with her lover, and after a time, they wordlessly pulled into the shore and made love. She described it as somehow instinctual, driven, and it puzzled her that in the midst of sorrow and dread, that this should have been their reaction. Many young women gave themselves to young men about to depart for the fighting during the Second World War (perhaps all wars) and if there was a moment of happiness for each of them, did it result in a happy event nine months later. (Imagine the psychologists trying to devise an experiment to test that hypothesis!) Happiness can be mixed with poignant sadness if the father never made it back or perhaps was not even known – so maybe the urge to procreate in the face of disaster is an instinct rather than the pursuit of momentary happiness. If we are driven by instinct, then where does happiness fit in? We human beings need to stay together for perhaps 21 years in order to raise a family, so the joys of sex are but rarely resultant in pregnancy but can form the glue that holds couples together – if they are lucky, and that is why it is not just the young, who may be enjoying the lockdown in their empty nests.


Do animals feel happiness?

It’s so hard not to be anthropocentric when looking at animals, to see the dog with its head on its master’s lap, to watch seagulls shooting the breeze or lambs leaping as they are in the fields here, and not imagine they feel happy – who knows. When I watch lambs playing, I simultaneously feel happy for the moment and sad because I know that very soon they will no longer be frisky but head down grazing for the rest of their lives with no great appearance of happiness ever again…

So there are my thoughts for the day – gather ye rosebuds in whatever ways you can at this sad/happy time. Listen to the bird-song without the roar of traffic, bask under skies not crisscrossed with con-trails, breath deep in the less polluted air, love the one(s) you’re with, practice Zen or whatever floats your boat (within the confines of the lockdown) and if you haven’t got a boat, your mind can imagine whatever you like and you can be happy with it… 

What has made me happy? Last night I took my new telescope outside for the first time and looked at the moon, large and even though slightly hazy, pure magic and wonder!

G is for Grammar

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Frankly my Dear –

Some people make a great fuss about Grammar, in short, they are pedants!
Those of us who write, or speak, in English, know that we can understand the language as it is spoken, no matter how “badly”, with words strung together in almost any old order. Not like the Germans who literally fall over and can’t understand you if you don’t put the verb at the end of the sentence ( I may be exaggerating slightly for comic effect) and what is with all those portmanteau words a sentence long? The French are not much better, they pretend they don’t understand you because of your atrocious accent and despise you even more if you don’t attempt to show yourself up – of course, they may just be (understandably)  miffed because French used to be the official international language unit English superceded it because, I believe of the ease with which you can learn it to the point of being understood. Why am I talking about speech when the subject of this blog is grammar? Well there is much the same ease of communication in written “English” as with speech – that is, it is easy to get to the point of being understood, being perfectly correct in speech or written English is another matter altogether. We have rules of grammar so arcane that they make putting the verb at the end of the sentence look like child’s play. But here is the point, if you can make yourself understood, even speaking or writing in a patois, then that is the most important thing. 

There is another reason I have talked about speech in a piece on grammar, and that is because, when I am writing, especially in a blog, which to my mind should sound, inside the reader’s head, as if you are talking to them, then grammar is there to help the reader to achieve that feat. Nowadays I use Grammarly, an app which is far more than a spell-checker, it spots extra spaces, offers fairly basic grammar suggestions and even assesses the tone of your writing, mine comes out, disappointingly, as “Formal” given that I strive for relative informality…

I am sure you will be glad that this is not the sort of blog where the writer offers compendious coverage of their chosen topic – the internet is there for that sort of thing if you really want the nitty-gritty of grammar but I hope you understand why I began with the quote “Frankly my Dear – I don’t give a damn…” If I can understand and be understood, I will not judge and I hope will not be judged on some pedantic point of grammatical correctness. 

I will, however, talk briefly about three things which I use a great deal, which the grammar police would probably disapprove of. Firstly, as in the “Gone with the Wind” quotation above I often use a hyphen rather than a comma when I want to indicate a slightly longer rpause than I feel a coma suggests. Likewise, at the end of the quotation, I have put there dots, the proper name of which is,  an ellipsis and the proper definition of which is “the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues.” Now I think you can see what I mean about obscure rules… What I mean when I finish a sentence with three dots, is that I want to leave the sentence idea hanging in the air and not terminated by the finality of a full stop.

Lastly, I want to mention the Oxford comma. This is the sort of rule that divides even the pedants of English grammar… In brief, I was taught at the age of seven or eight, and I actually remember the very lesson – that you should NEVER put a comma before an and. Now the strange thing, is that I grew up in, and received this lesson in Oxford, and though I have been using the Oxford comma, the breaking of this rule for a long time. I use it because it reads better as if spoken. An example is the comma after the word Oxford (first instance) in the preceding sentence. In the following sentence you would not use the Oxford comma ” My favourite puddings in order are Bread and Butter Pudding, Apple Crumble, Peaches and Cream.” But in this sentence you would – “The ingredients required are Flour, Sugar, Peaches, and Cream”. Makes it read right…

 So there it is, ignore the rules as long as you are understood and to my mind, what makes writing sound like speech is what works best…

I Don’t Give a Damn…

Postscript to Fighting…

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This morning, after posting F is for Fighting, I read a piece online in the Financial Times by the wonderful writer Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things) written five days ago. It tells of the tragic events unfolding in India under the [monstrous] Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister – Narendra Modi. The usual catalogue of bad decisions based on early denial, but in a country of teeming millions of poor crammed into slums, this will be a human disaster of epic proportions.

In her preamble, Arundhati says, and I can’t quote for copywriter reasons and so must paraphrase, but please go and read the full work – that governments who are in charge of the response to the virus pandemic are fond of referring to it as a war and that they mean it literally rather than metaphorically. But if it was really a war, then the US, which has been woefully unprepared for the virus, would be the best prepared with guns and planes, soldiers and bombs.

Arundhati Roy spells out in much more detail than I and with far greater eloquence, the dangers of poor leadership and the human costs that are being engendered. At the end, she describes pandemics throughout history, as portals to a different future where-through we will have choices to make about whether we return to the same old systems which have been revealed  as broken, such as capitalism – or choose another direction…

F is for Fighting…

humanist55
This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge. I have decided to theme the posts around personal and societal responses to the Covid 19 crisis, including my resumption of Blogging!

Fighting a war, fist fighting, fighting for your rights, fighting off an attacker, fighting the good fight, fighting for peace, fighting off an infection, fighting boredom, fighting flab, fighting sleep, fighting insomnia, depression, a sense of failure, fighting old age, fighting for recognition, justice, fighting to be heard, fighting an election, fighting the war on drugs, fighting terrorism, fighting for the environment, fighting for survival, the uses of the word fighting are legion but in this list, and I am sure you can think of more examples, only the first four are literal fights – the rest are metaphorical. When one activity carries such a plethora of metaphors, it must surely say something about our humanity.


It’s not exclusively a human trait to fight, animals do it to win a mate or in defense of territory and in many cases it may not even come to blows – elaborate posturing, special apparatus designed to impress may do the trick although in other cases real and sometimes mortal damage is inflicted. These are legitimate causes for fighting – reproduction and territory are about survival – short and long term but as a species, humans have raised fighting to a planet-wide, all-life-threatening status. For a species that prides itself, defines itself even, on the size of its brain, this activity does not make sense.

The United States of America, of it’s 242 years history, has been at peace with no wars ongoing, external or internal, for just 16 years. Former President Jimmy Carter allegedly pointed this out to Donald Trump in 2019 and added ” We have wasted, I think, $3 trillion [on] military spending. China has not wasted a single penny on war and that’s why they’re ahead of us in almost every way.” One imagines it made little impression on a man whose stance in life is, more often than not, belligerent. I said that animals fight in defense of territory and like the metaphor above, fighting for peace, this sounds a contradiction in terms. Just as the military wing of the government is usually called the Department of Defense or similar – rarely the Department of War as this would imply that waging war was an aim of government – not a response to potential outside aggression.

In George Orwell’s classic novel of a political and dystopian future “Nineteen Eighty-Four” we see how the use of the right terms is vital for the control of the masses by the few. “Great” Britain has become Airstrip One and is a mere province of the superstate Oceania which tells its citizens that is in (perpetual) war and exhorts them to greater effort, greater tightening of the belt (remind you of austerity?). Published just after the Second World War when the Tehran Conference had divided the world up into zones of influence, the book has as many warnings today as ever about the scrutiny we need to place on those who govern…

The other day I heard someone saying on the radio (in the plethora of discussion about Covid 19 I am afraid I didn’t clock the speaker) that we keep referring to the National Health Service workers as the frontline workers in this fight against the virus but that it would be better if the people at large regarded themselves as the front line since it will be the degree of their adherence to not going out that will determine the reduction of deaths at the final reckoning. So we should be the “Home Front” a term that came about during the Second World War to give unity and focus to a population only some of whom were experiencing the direct effects of bombing whilst for those out in the country, there was little immediate evidence of the war raging across the world. Rationing, inventive cooking, improvisation and substitution – all the things we are experiencing under lockdown.

Here is the disconnect at the heart of our mass response to Covid 19 – for most people it is not serious and even if they do catch it it will not feel serious – we can’t see the crisis in the hospitals, only empty streets, shutdown shops and we experience a sense of unreality. Even when we watch the nightly news reports with the climbing death tolls, we do not connect with the reality, over 5000 people in the UK now, that’s a stadium full! If we could have taken it seriously, then we would have started preparing earlier when we heard the reports coming out of China. Logic dictates that if you can pass on an infection before you show symptoms, a pandemic is inevitable but human beings are not notably logical and so the fact that this virus is not evenly fatal fuels the disconnect.

We find ourselves living in the movie set of a post-apocalyptic event (such as a pandemic) but there are no rotting bodies in the streets and no feral gangs of survivors breaking into shut down shops. In this respect, barring some early hoarding of toilet rolls and flour (I blame the Great British Bake-off for making everybody believe they should bake their way through the crisis) the majority of people have responded with the best that humans can be to this strange challenge. Imagine though, how things would have been without the internet to inform and entertain us, to share tips and memes and love.

In the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, things were very different. Coming at the end of the First World War, starting out, it is thought, in a military base in Kansas, the troops heading out to Europe spread it and 20 to 50 million died – more than the 17 million who died in WW1 and this may not be accurate as there was no means of testing the many victims or recording data accurately and even with all of our advanced technology this current pandemic still presents some of the same problems. We do not fully understand why Spanish Flu was so lethal and we have much to learn about why Covid 19 is so lethal for some and not for others. Incidentally, the name Spanish Flu came about because most of the countries involved in WW1 had censorship in place for military purposes and the powers that be suppressed news of the pandemic, afraid of public panic except for Spain which was neutral, had no censorship and freely discussed the disease, including the Spanish King becoming ill. I say this on the day that Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister is reported to be receiving escalating treatment in Intensive Care…

Returning to the metaphorical use of the word fighting – in the world of religion, we have “onward Christian soldiers” and we have Jihad a term which modern Moslems struggle to re-interpret as a metaphorical personal battle for spiritual development and not in its apparent, original meaning of a battle to forcibly convert non-believers. It goes to show how careful we need to be with metaphor – especially those based on images of war and fighting and we need to be especially vigilant that we do not give the latitude to right-wing leaders to take excessive powers under the cover of crisis sending us back to the future of 1984…

I am going to give the last word to that great storyteller and observer of his times – Charles Dickens in his opening to A Tale of Two Cities – almost a perfect metaphor in itself –
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Roundup 2 – other blogs on the A to B 2020 Challenge

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I am working my way through the list of participating blogs which is now over 500 of which I have opened 120 now – phew! Here are the more of the those i have decided to follow:-

I may be a man but I am first and foremost a designer so I have done an evening course in dressmaking and can make a shirt. I crochet but mostly Tunisian crochet which is slightly obscure. I help my partner with her sewing machine projects and this site Quilting Patchwork Applique appeals for a couple of reasons. First of all the selection of images in the banner are unusual including a wolf hiding in the forest. Secondly, the site is bi-lingual, everything duplicated in French and English – not just trusting to Google translate if people want to be bothered. For us English speaking peoples, it’s easy to forget that there is a whole world of other-language internet and this is a refreshing window…

Mk1 and Mk2 of a Tunisian Crochet handbag I made as a sampler of all the stitches I could find…

Sharon E Cathcart is a novelist but instead of using the Challenge to promote her writing directly, or practice writing to a theme, Sharon is sharing her research into Pompei which she has done for a future book and she is revealing some interesting details – hope she makes it to Z!

Jane Turley over at “The Witty Ways of a Wayward Woman” – what can I say – your description of making cabbage soup had me laughing out loud (I will not brook the acronym for that phrase in a blog) – does what it says on the tin!

Tommia’s Tablet – favourite things of a 50 year old woman – a photograph and a poem, what’s not to like!

When I look down the list of blogs, a name like Zombie Flamingos gets me going and this site’s theme for the challenge is to introduce us to the life and work of Female Photographers. Sadly, in our still too male-dominated world, the names here will include those who are not so famous so watch this space. Having said this, the first up is Dianne Arbus – a favourite of mine ever since she was featured in a Sunday colour supplement back in the 70’s. Then we have some names I didn’t know though I had seen some of the work, Margaret Bourke-White, Julia Margaret Cameron (see below) and Rineke Dijkstra.


John Herscel by Julia Margaret Cameron – see Zombie Flamingos