HURRAH FOR ACTIVISTS!

What is happening today?   Today there is some warm almost spring sunshine in Inverness.   And so, for the benefit of our health, we two ancients went a-walking down by the very full and fast-flowing River Ness.   We walked for about half-a-mile, just enough for our old bones.   Now Gerald is making wholemeal bread, and yours truly decided to escape from the kitchen, and to write this blog.

What else is new?   Yesterday I read a great long blog by Laurie Penny which I found on the New Statesman Magazine website – www.newstatesman.com/blogs.   It was all about a book called ‘Vagina’ by Naomi Wolf.   She sleights the author for using her immediate social milieu - mostly upper middle-class New York smart women, discussing their experiences of love with men in the same class, that is with money to buy flowers etc., etc., whereas ordinary, usually poorer-off women, perhaps in Africa, but who are to be found all over the world, have a harder and more difficult experience.   According to Laurie Penny this book is letting women and the fight for women’s rights down.   It is titillating to men, and she cites an example of such writing in the highly successful erotic publication known to all as ‘50 Shades of Grey’.  Laurie Perry is a wonderful writer.   I see that this week in the same magazine her subject is the glass ceiling as she describes a meeting with the 82-year-old activist for women’s rights, and founder of the “wages for housework” campaign, Selma James.   I’d never heard of her.  She was born in Brooklyn and now lives in London.   She seems to be a remarkable woman who has always fought for the underdog.   There is such an active world going on out there, especially in London.   I never considered myself a feminist, but perhaps I was wrong not to take up the cause.   Too late now!   But I wish I could be paid for sixty years of housework!

Other things to bug me:   My daughter’s neighbour’s son has lost one of his university classmates in the “insurgent” attacks in Mali where the French are now fighting.   Six British boys lost their lives. Sad day for some poor parents.

David Cameron is sounding off about what Britain can get to its advantage from the European Union by renegotiating the terms of the treaty signed in Maastrich long ago.   How will it go?  He says he wants the country to stay in Europe (don’t all sane people?) but we must get a better deal, he says.   And who will lose out so we in Britain can gain new advantages?  This is the trouble with democracy.   You have to go with the flow or take up another hobby away from politics.   I have decided we must do as Jesus told us to do, in order to stop ourselves from going crazy – “Consider the lilies of the field.   They neither reap nor do they sow, yet have I provided for them.”   Except lilies don’t grow in Scotland.   At least not in the winter.

I will finish with a quotation from Robert Burns, our beloved Scottish Poet whose commemorative day it was on the 25^th, yesterday.

“Oh would what power the giftie gie us to see ourselves as others see us!”!

Translated it means (the ‘giftie’ being God)   Oh, would God only give the gift to see ourselves as others see us.

How would people like David Cameron, George Osborne, or Alex Salmond like to see themselves as others see them or hear what people say about them?  I have to say I don’t think I could stand to have that gift given to me either. No way! 

I wish you sunshine such as we had today in Inverness – but just a good bit warmer, please God!   And Good Luck ANDY MURRAY, TOMORROW!!