Music and Cricket : Glimpses of England

Commentary : February 19th, 2021

2050.....2035....2030 - Stop there - 2030.

I have a problem with how to pitch this proposal where it counts. Here in America, in spite of the repeated nervous caveats concerning the pandemic, the natural disasters and not-so-coded messages from the Almighty, just over half the population is breathing deep sighs of relief every day as we hear leaders who speak soberly and sanely or at least intelligibly and the rhetoric from the top is beginning to spread hope across the wider world. "The world can longer do the minimum in the face of climate change" says Biden today as we re-sign the Paris Accord we should never have left. So why my rising frustration and alarm?

"Too little too late so far and continuing" is my theme, which may seem harsh and ungrateful to shout now in the face of reassurances from the titans of capitalism and government, that the recent paroxysms of blind greed are over. I fear that we are suicidally mistaken if we believe in the talking up, the figures, the promises, even some of the science.

Glimpses of England : The Race to the Last

Once a year there was a cross-country race for the whole school. Legendary athletes had run the course in absurdly short times – we had one of those Pheidippides in our year, who I think went on to push the mile record to close on four minutes but was not the gangling doctor-to-be who broke the barrier first on a scruffy off the beaten track track on the Iffley Road in Oxford close to where I lived in later times this story is not of those near-Olympian demigods but of me and my friends

Poetry : From Time to Time I Tangle

Stuck in the Middle Ages

Poetry : Playing Hide and Seek With God

Glimpses of England : Outdoors in the Perambulator, 1946

 

England was where my early life was apparently much spent in my perambulator the grand carriage four-wheeler kind the lonely ship in which I was put out to air and left to imbibe the silence of the spheres and learn the lessons of self-reliance there being no loving arms available at the time and the isolation was Good for me and the stories told are that I shouted swearwords from my limited infant vocabulary learned from my father back from the war and possessed of rapidly improving RAF English and that some time earlier in the thick of falling V2 rockets Daisy our devoted servant who had been with my grandmother since she was 15 and fresh from rural poverty and in the 1970's was still paid ten shillings a couple of bucks a week and board had run a panic-blurred mile from the shops to get me home to the big house and the huge cellar our air-raid shelter where we slept twenty or more for much of the war while occasionally the German planes added future playground craters to the vicinity and lent colour to our lives and reminiscences true and untrue for the next hundred years