Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Three beautiful things last weekend

The unusual radiant grace of a fifteen month old boy who drinks in each new experience through enormous eyes and seems to consider every possibility in each moment with calm concentration and quiet wonder.

The ecstatic expressions of people in a packed bar dancing themselves closer to exhaustion whilst they sang the ancient anthem of their village’s fiesta.

The look of astonishment and delight on the faces of a young Spanish couple whose car was stuck in the snow as night began to fall when a stout party turned his car around near the top of a mountain pass and came back to help them push it out.

Friday, November 28, 2008

christmas ! did any one mention christmas ?






this morning, i was in a well-known "pile-'em-high, sell-'em-cheap" supermarket ... inspecting the half-price christmas decorations ... a few feet from me along the aisle stood a well-spoken country-wife in a puffa jacket and elastic-sided equestrian boots ... she picked up a toy turkey, less than half life-sized, which was made of felt, and was dressed as father christmas ... and it instantly began to sing jingle bells ... quite loudly, like a rather jolly man, kevin spacey perhaps, but it gobbled just like a real turkey at the end of each line ... blushing like a whole garden of roses, the lady looked around at the smart women behind the pharmaceutical counter, and then at me, and sounded quite panic-stricken when she said, "I don't know how to stop it !" ... so i put on a sympathetic smile and sidled over, a bit like vincent price playing the surgeon in the tingler, only not so well-spoken, or nearly as nice ... and murmured ... "maybe you should wring it's neck !"

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

in war, truth is the first casualty ... today's guardian ran some extracts from the war diary of david cotterrell




























Bloody reality ... last year, the artist David Cotterrell went to Afghanistan to observe the work of military medical staff at the main field hospital at Camp Bastion. His diary and photographs, now on show at the Wellcome Institute in London, are a harrowing reminder of the cost of war






... well worth reading, if only for the last paragraph

Friday, November 21, 2008