February/March Blog
The last few weeks have been a tumultuous time. We’ve seen severe storms, freezing cold weather, days of endless rain. And against a background of shifting political scenarios. Covid rules have relaxed and all but disappeared, except people do insist on wearing face coverings, even though they don’t need to and it is doubtful that it does much good. Boris Johnson has been teetering on the edge of being ousted because of parties held at number 10 during lockdown and even the police have been called in to conduct a thorough investigation - and then hey presto, all that seems forgotten by the media. No talk of Covid, of parties and police investigations. We now have nothing but the war in Ukraine on the news and Boris has escaped by the skin of his teeth, as everyone has bigger fish to fry.
It is difficult in these troubled times, faced with Russian aggression, not to cast our minds back to the cold war days of the Seventies and Eighties. Sometimes, with the mounting tensions that are going on, one can feel that the minutiae of every day life has become inconsequential. These thoughts makes me think of that poem by Auden, Musee des beaux arts, where he comments about the painting by Bruegel, where the white legs of Icarus can be seen disappearing into the green ocean whilst all about life is blithely going on. . .
What choice have we, but to go on doing the small things of life that need to be done: cooking our food/cleaning our houses/weeding our gardens, etc., while another madman is flying too close to the sun again?
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