Making Up our Own Minds

 We’ll Mostly Make Up Our Own Minds 

 

 

March 2020. It all seemed very strange. We were in Spain, leaving a couple of days before the lockdown that had just been announced there. 

 

Given two days’ notice, the second homeowners of Madrid and other metropolises busted out in refugee numbers, fleeing to the Costas. At the time, it seemed that the Spanish authorities had badly bungled. This year, a similarly signalled lockdown in France was deliberately timed to allow people in Paris to escape to second homes… thus it goes. Nothing short of police state tactics is going to prevent the well-off from arranging their lockdown lives away from the cities, if they so choose, in spite of the hollow guidance of governments everywhere.

Lockdown Dissent

 Lockdown Dissent

 

 

One of the more curious features of the lockdowns and other regimes brought in to protect against the pandemic has been the emergence of do-it-yourself forms of anarchism.

Turning 70

 Turning 70

 

When I look back on significant anniversaries, my main impression now is that I had a sense of relief that nothing had suddenly changed overnight. A 40 I still looked and felt young. I had a young family. At 50 I looked youngish and felt reasonably young. In that decade I would take up triathlons. I enrolled for, and successfully completed, a philosophy MA. I was still working steadily and confidently. 60 felt okay – advanced middle age rather than old. To prove that, a celebratory last Olympic-length triathlon, and in the next couple of years, 2 half marathons.

Time & Tide Bells; Trinity Buoy Wharf

 Time & Tide Bells; Trinity Buoy Wharf

 

 

Antony Gormley is the pre-eminent artist of the tidal foreshore, where land and sea converge. He has positioned 100 iron casts of his body (as usual) on a beach in Merseyside, spaced out over 2 miles.

 

The figures are wholly exposed at low tide and fully submerged at high tide. The figures are neither waving, nor drowning, and they are certainly not King Canutes. They are poignant occupiers of the watery, sandy, liminal space

Vaccination Diary

 Vaccination Diary

 

 

At some time at the beginning of the first century CE (AD) the Romans conducted a tax census in  the province of Judaea. According to one of the Gospels, it was decreed by the Emperor that people must return to their tribal areas to be registered. Two returnees were Joseph and the pregnant Mary, who had to get back to Bethlehem – where they had no place to stay, their home being in Nazareth, in another province.

Enemies of Liberal Democracy

 Enemies of Liberal Democracy

 

What is “liberal democracy” in a multicultural society, where citizens have different, and often opposing, beliefs and viewpoints, many grounded in absolute, or fairly absolute, conceptions of the world?

 

One theory of liberal democracy is that it is a system, not for resolving differences, but for managing them, grounded by respect for the equality of all citizens, and in the justice of its institutions.

Testing Times

 Testing Times

 

 

Car parks may sometimes be a welcome sight, but they are seldom a pretty one. Alexandra Park and Palace in North London, for all its attractive features (not least the views) has some pretty grim examples.

 

Fortunately, the largest area reserved for cars is in a corner by the southerly road entrance, screened by the slope and by trees. It is known as the “Paddock” car park – a name connected to the fact that for many years there was a small but popular racecourse on the flat expanse of the Park.