International – Page 16 – For the fainthearted . . .

Politicians without beauty

Is there beauty to be found in Twenty-First Century politics? It doesn’t seem likely.

There was once an aspiration at the heart of the British Labour Party that life should something more than simple material progress, that a fair and just society demanded more than a redistribution of monetary wealth. There was a desire, which was held much more widely than just within the ranks of the Labour Party, that ordinary people should be able to live lives for more than just wages and purchases. Reading rooms, evening classes, lectures, …

Cancelling cancelling

There is something troubling about the cancel culture, where does it stop? Who decides what is acceptable? Who determines which history is remembered? Were every piece of writing or work of art judged on the perceived political views of the writer or artist, how much would be left on public display, or be judged fit for broadcast?

Would the books of Henry Williamson, writer of Tarka the Otter, be allowed to be sold? Williamson was an admirer of Adolf Hitler and Oswald Mosley.

Do the racial opinions of Richard Wagner …

Golden days

Oh my darling, Clementine was still a popular song in the 1960s. Perhaps it reflected the fascination at the time with all things American. It was the sort of song where even a bad singer could enjoy the singing of the refrain.

Oh my darling, oh my darling
Oh my darling, Clementine
You were lost and gone forever
Dreadful sorrow, Clementine.

The song was inspired by the California Gold Rush, which reached its peak in 1849. Gold was first found in California on this day in one hundred and seventy-nine …

Prairie cold

My colleague smiled at the idea that the weather of this past week was cold. Cold for her meant below -30 or even -40 The report from Scotland that the temperature had reached -23 would have gone unremarked in her Alberta Prairie home. She recalled a day when schools had to be closed because the fuel had frozen in the the tanks of the school buses. Driving a school bus in rural Alberta herself, she smiles at complaints that driving on English roads in wintertime.

A farmer I knew would …

Occupants of the Republic of Conscience

“Two arms the one length” is the English rendering of an Irish proverb. It means being empty-handed, carrying nothing, and arriving with nothing. It is a proverb used by Seamus Heaney in his poem From the Republic of Conscience.

The poem, which appears in Heaney’s 1987 collection The Haw Lantern, was first commissioned and published in 1985 to mark the 25th anniversary of Amnesty International. The third part begins:

I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance

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Unfortunately, no aliens have been to see us

it is the 40th anniversary of the Trans-en-Provence sighting of a UFO. On 8th January 1981, a sighting which was described in detail by Renato Nicolai, the French farmer who had the close encounter:

I have lived in Trans-en-Province at my current address for nearly 14 years. My wife and I live alone. She is the cleaning lady at the social security office in Draguignan. I have not worked since November 1979. I was previously an employee of the SCNI company. This firm went out of business and I was

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