International – Page 20 – For the fainthearted . . .

It should have been in a boneyard

The BBC reported on the thousands of aircraft grounded as a consequence of the SARS-Cov-2 crisis. It featured “boneyards,” remote airfields where aircraft are laid up, sometimes for decades. Doing a web search, I discovered that the oldest airliner in a boneyard dated from 1952.

I remember an aircraft that might have been retrieved from a boneyard.

It was late September 2001 and the whole trip suddenly seemed ill advised. It was a trip to the Philippines, ten years on from the previous visit, to see how communities had progressed …

Two men remembered

A friend expressed concern that with the centenaries of the Great War now past, there would be the beginning of a forgetfulness, that even observances like the nightly Last Post ceremony at the Menin Gate would begin to be questioned.

Perhaps the remembering requires keeping alive the stories of the men who died, like the tales of two who died on this day in 1917, one hundred and three years ago.

They lie near each other in Artillery Wood cemetery in Flanders, Francis Ledwidge, a labourer from Co Meath, and …

Missing the Tour

It is strange for it to be Bastille Day and for there to be no Tour de France. It is scheduled to begin on Saturday, 29th August, but a Tour in September will not be like a Tour in the joyful days of summer.

In times past, when my children were at school, our holidays were taken for the month of August and Le Tour was a countdown to our departure. Perhaps it was a sense of anticipation that invested the race with a sense of mystique, each stage bringing …

Toilet mats and economic growth

Do you remember the bathroom mats that became fashionable the 1970s? Do you remember the ones with shaggy, long pile that came in colours like mauve and pale pink? They were bathroom mats that represented luxury to those of us used to standing on cold linoleum or even colder tiles.

I saw such a mat hanging on a washing line. It was one that was cut to fit around the base of a toilet bowl. It was a reminder that the world is becoming a better place.

It is thirty …

The truth doesn’t matter

One of the most baffling things about the adherents of some beliefs is proof that they are wrong only confirms members of the group in their belief that they are right.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses predicted the day of God’s wrath would come in 1918. This unfulfilled prophecy was followed by a belief in the resurrection of figures from the Bible in 1925. The patriarchs did not reappear. The Witnesses believed the world would end in 1975. Plainly, it did not. The fact they were completely and repeatedly wrong wrong did …

A tous les Francais

Today, in towns and villages across France, there will have been commemorations of 18th June 1940. It is fitting that President Emmanuel Macron has come to London to mark the anniversary because it was from London that eighty years ago today was eighty years ago today that General Charles de Gaulle’s made his appeal to the French people.

De Gaulle’s broadcast that day in the summer of 1940, on the English-speaking BBC, was only actually heard by a minority of French people. His broadcast on the BBC four days later …