The card table is balanced on the old coffee table – giving us a square surface on which to play. The fire is on, we are warm. Crumbs from the Dundee cake land on the table and the cards and we brush them to the floor. There are two egg cups perched on the corners of the table. They each hold an ounce of Jameson Whisky. We are poor drinkers and card sharks. But we will play Machiavelli to the death. 

The rain has been falling steadily all week but the wind is quiet, not ready to push the rain or us around. The roadsides are splashed with yellow. Some call the big loose bushes Mexican Marigolds but they look almost Indian in their brightness. There is another swatch of yellow and green along the roadside – a succulent who is claiming this climate as its own. Three times I have seen rhododendrons pushing purple and crimson buds into the New Year. No one can tell them to stop.

And no-one can tell the soldiers to stop either.

While the news reporters focus on Christmas lights, spontaneous angry killings alternating with acts of kindnesses they have withdrawn from the horrors that continue in Gaza, The Sudan and Ukraine to name just those we have carried through this last year. Now the Unites States President has turned his watery unfocused eyes on Venezuela with its oil. He is trying for a replay of the British taking over the Iranian oil fields in the 1950s. Someone must have been watching Taghi Amirani’s film Coup 53 and suggested that America could have another crack at this kind of takeover. We are blinded in the headlamps of this US government administration’s decisions that come tumbling out of the revolving side door of The White House. Last week, off-shore energy windmills were cancelled and more American jobs were lost. In Kentucky the Japanese-owned Jim Beam bourbon whiskey company will halt production at its main site for all of 2026. Halt – not yet close down – but still there are more American jobs lost, families that will go hungry, get sick and even die because of the government tariffs that effect all American industries. This week came the recalling of career ambassadors from around the world. They are to be replaced with new ‘loyal diplomats’  to the agenda of this administration over and above that of the American people. That is a strange sentence to write but becoming more true with every decision coming through the revolving door. First out the door – or into the ring – is the special envoy sent to Greenland to place it ‘under US control.’

With trade and educational wheeling and dealing Sir Keir Starmer is clawing Britain’s way back closer to Europe in a desperate bid for some safety. While Europe has promised Ukraine 90 billion Euros in funds to continue the war with Russia, alliances need to be stronger as Europe faces off openly with Russia and the US putting in place loyal  – to the president – diplomats.

It is the Christmas Holiday and in Northern California it is raining steadily, the water soaking into the dry ground making mud, rivulets and drawing nourishment from the soil to turn the hills a deeper, richer green. A Loveliness of Ladybugs has come inside our hayloft home. They crash into the paper lanterns and settle on the window ledges waiting for this storm to be over but the rain continues to fall. Outside the sheep seem not to care, though the chickens return to their pens to wait the weather out. I go into the vegetable garden and hunt for sorrel. The first starter was given to me by a tough midwestern pal of Northern European decent. The sorrel, with a deep tap root is tough too, and thrives with total neglect though the year. It drinks up the rain and now the leaves are ready for my harvest. Sorrel leaves, a potato, maybe a leek and there is soup to warm the family this winter week. At this time of the year, in all our traditions, for a brief time we close our minds to the outside world to focus on our families and yet I cannot but picture the grandmothers in the Ukrainian countryside searching their small patch of land for some sorrel, a potato and maybe a leek. I hope that they can find them. 

This has been A Letter From. A Broad Written and read for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side and as always supported by Beatrice from MurchStudio