Decisions

November 17, 2025 / aggiemurch / 2 Comments

Decisions,

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side

It started with relentless knee pain that would not go away and it was time to see a doctor. Mr. Mazin Ibrahim took one look at my walking and, with experienced confidence, says. “It’s not your knee. It’s your hip, it’s completely worn away and here are the X-rays to prove it.”

It was a slow dance, back and forth, a cortisone injection to the hip, an appointment with a fantastic physical therapist, another determination to lose weight, and for a month or two the cortisone worked – until it didn’t. The pain returned and with it the realization that it was time for ‘The Decision.’ As I begin the emails, phone calls the explanation of schedule, the booking, the payments and the appointments, I have to accept I am on the other side of the nursing desk. Each time I said “I am a nurse too” I can see my nurse dance partners take a deep breath and guide me to their agenda. As Mibaba, the diminutive Philippine nurse, goes through the detailed admission her voice lifts with a musical “Mam” at the end of each question. Before she is finished, she is asking for a full report from my cardiologist. There is no stone this young woman left unturned. Eventually satisfied, she leads me along the corridor where I see a pair of leather-shod feet which I know, just by the way they are pointed, belong on the end of long legs. Mibaba introduces me to Desmond, from Essex and Uganda. He is tall and, as an orthopedic specialist nurse should be, light on his feet. He has seen it all before and fielding my “I’m a nurse too,” slipping into the nurses’ banter and humor. He is laughingly professional with deep knowledge and warmth and we exchange phone numbers.

It’s a 7 a.m start as we arrive at the brightly lit entrance to the Princess Grace Hospital. A cheery Scottish receptionist checks me in, all my paperwork and payment is in order. In the reception area we are joined by other couples. One by one, we are picked up by out admitting nurses and taken to our own private rooms to change… Walter helps me settle in, and himself to the waiting ahead.

And it is in. That seems to be a real screw in there!

Two attendants come with a gurney and I am slipped onto it. The basement is where the action is, the corridor so narrow that there is only room for one gurney at a time – one in, one out. The door to the surgical suite is open and two men are still mopping the floor as we wheel on past them to a blunt-nosed tiny tool shed. There is just room for the gurney to slide in, with the tool benches all around. “Anesthesiologist” He shouts at me through his mask while pointing to the words on his cap. There are two of them, both Indian, both male, doctor and nurse, a team dancing together as they prepare their next patient for the umpteenth time. Sit up, legs over the edge of the gurney and, cradled in the safe arms of the young nurse who holds me as the anesthesiologist calls out, “Don’t move. Be still”. Now this gurney is wheeled into the newly cleaned and mopped surgical suite. There are fresh big blue containers of sterile equipment, the all-male team also clothed in blue, among them is my surgeon, ready to help hoist me from the gurney onto his table. ‘Wait” I want to say, “I haven’t lost enough weight.” Then an oxygen mask covers my nose and mouth and I’m out.

Back in room 312, Walter is waiting. He sits quietly, watching over us all as I look at my numb legs in my big diaper, “better than a catheter” and I have to agree while watching and participating in the incredible disposable waste that clogs our planet. Day moves to night and back to day. Walter walks across the park from home to hospital and back again. Nurses and therapists, their voices blending in a symphony of all those who make up the serving faces of England today, come and go. Dawn is late while, carefully watched, I get up to the bathroom and wash before a reasonable pot of tea shows up at 7.30 with breakfast. My bladder is working unaided – for which I am truly grateful. As a liquid laxative is washed down with an oral suspension of Morphine I am dimly aware that they might not be the best of dance partners. It is not until the next day when Saturday’s supper returns with a vengeance that everyone gets serious about those absent bowel sounds and my discharge is postponed.

The physical therapist pops in to tackle up and down stairs, and so we go up and down the stairs with no problem until the last dose of morphine kicks in and I slide into a chair. Well if this is a way to change this dimension for the next – it’s fine with me.

Then home, bags of drugs, wise unheeded words from the nurses ‘Don’t let the pain get ahead of you’. And I leave the safety of their care. The world of nurses, these are the voices I want to hear. Melodious, musical and on the brink of laughter if you are someone who would let that in.

Back at home there is warmth by the fire, a kind and willing helper for all things, those exercises to be done and the pain iced away. Walter is ever-vigilant as friends come bearing meals. With such care it takes only a few days to accept that this was the right decision and I am going to get better.

October chilled into November and there are distractions. November 4th was an election day in North America. There were celebrations from New York as Zohran Mamdani is voted to be the new Mayor, redistricting passes in California, and governorships going to Democrats Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey. All this on the night before we sit together watching the fireworks from the remembrance of Guy Fawkes who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. The King and Crown also chose this time to banish Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, to the dark forest of Norfolk. From the depth of next January he will call a corner of the 20,000 acre Sandringham Estate home. It is time to start sorting books from bookshelves and suits from his wardrobe.

While I write, the United States President has risen up from 20,000 leagues under the sea and murky waters of the Eastern Seaboard. Not content to wave his tentacles across the American media, crushing those who displease him he has, in a circular sweep with his pal Benjamin, now focused on the BBC. Searching for a hook which which to snare this big fish they have found a questionable editorial choice from an October 28th Panorama Program last year about the US President.

The hook is tightly embedded, heads have rolled, and the mighty organization is left rudderless with no captain or first-mate to hold the ship steady. Another decision is to be made, apologize or stand firm, or even let the Government make this decision for them. Pontus Pilate did not have it any easier.

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

It’s the Trees

April 14, 2025 / aggiemurch / 1 Comment

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side.

The tail winds bring the plane into London fifteen minutes early and so we circle the city, sometimes dipping low over Windsor Great Park then rising over Queen Alexandra’s Palace before eventually fitting into our designated time slot – diving down and bump, bump, bumping to the runway. The afternoon sun is shining brightly by the time we pile into a taxi.

“We have a lot of luggage.” “Sit yourselves down and I’ll pack it around you.” and with that instruction and in charge tone we are welcomed back. The traffic is light as between a waitress shift – after lunch and before dinner – as we head out around the roundabout onto the M4 Motorway which is still bordered by the scruffy fields holding a couple of caravans and the travelers piebald ponies half-hidden by the tall hawthorne hedgerows that are coming into leaf. The motorway dips to the city, passing the hat-tip of industry and settling onto the highly packed houses of Hounslow and Acton. The grass verges are left un-mowed, the dead daffodil blossoms are allowed to recede into the soil for next year. Dandelions take this opportunity to stand up and offer their yellow heads to the emerging bumble bees, and for a moment before the council can attack there is harmony in these narrow strips of roadside grass. This road into the city is deeply familiar and, bathed in the afternoon the sunlight, is welcoming. Turning the corner onto Prince Albert’s Terrace I see the newly worked hawthorne is sprouting as the bent branches form a hedge tough enough for sheep and cattle, and well able to hold the children climbing and swinging in the playground. Tired as we are the sight lifts our spirits. Sunlight can do that.

Our in-charge taxi driver sets about unloading all the luggage, knowing that small as our home is there will be a big tip. We are grateful for his help and unlocking the door we are even more grateful to enter our clean and welcoming cottage. It is small, and for now a safe haven from that world we have left.

We make it to the first evening, turning on the BBC news and to our dismay find that far from having left it, the American political scene is playing out on our screens. I have to remember that the same scene is being played out on news channels across the world in different languages – both verbal and body – as the news-casters try their utmost to report the news of American tariffs on their and other countries. Reeta Chakrabarti can hardly keep a straight face as she reports on the pending cutting down of the nearly 200 year old Magnolia Tree on the White House south lawn. It was planted by Andrew Jackson to honor the memory of his late wife, who died before he took office in 1829. The current US president said that wood from the tree, known as the Jackson Magnolia, will be used for “Other high and noble purposes”. He went on to say the tree was a safety concern and would be replaced by another ‘very beautiful tree’. I tend to worry when this US president uses the word ‘very’ – as in very beautiful, very nasty, very bad. And saddened that a tree, with such history is being killed on a whim.

Penguins on Norfork Island are confused by Liberation Day. Photo from Dales Radio.

Reeta then took a deep breath as the news continued with the American President holding up boards with columns and numbers – this is, after all, a business meeting presentation, though his hair is too slicked down at the sides leaving the sparse top fluffing in the wind, showing where tariffs would be imposed when the scene suddenly cuts away – shifting from the President holding up his board to the Norfolk Island Penguins, who presumably have just seen it – waddling along as fast as they can, no doubt worrying about the 10% tariffs being imposed on their guano that is carried out to sea. Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which form an external territory of Australia, are among the remotest places on Earth, accessible only via a two-week boat voyage from Perth in Australia. Anthony Albanese, the Australian Prime Minister, was as surprised as the penguins by the announcement saying “Nowhere on Earth is safe.”

And I wonder about that. Even if everything was reversed, right now this minute, lives have been altered, some destroyed, there is more than one death that can be attributed to the maniacal behaviour coming from Washington D.C.

Even here in this quiet corner of London we feel it, the head-shaking from our neighbors, the decisions not to visit America – the US president is on every newscast in this country and around most of the world and that is possibly a Very Important Thing for him.

We have been back almost a week and still every night the President is front and center of the newscasts. The protests that we know are happening all over the American coastlines get very little coverage. Each country is more concerned with this storm across the global markets and has little time or energy to think of the American people who voted for or against this President. The Universities, medical research, the arts and even in the heartland farmers will feel the swish of his scythe.

The Israeli Prime Minister popped into to Washington for a visit. The two men sat at the head of a table, which holds a large model plane that looks to be waiting for one of them to pick it up and run around the room playing like a five-year-old, making whoosh plane noises as they dive bomb the nodding heads, sitting suited in uniform, turned to face their leaders. Maybe this is where the plane turns and lifts off, flying beyond America hovering over China, Europe and Iran, spoiling for a fight with real blood.

Poor Sir Keir Starmer looks out of his depth as he goes out to meet the people and leaders in UK industry. Yesterday he was at the Jaguar Land Rover factory, a heavyweight plant of Industry whose CEO, Adrian Mardell, has said they are pausing exports to the US for a month. He is giving Starmer time to do something but Sir Keir’s earnestness is not very convincing and Rachael Reeves is getting shrill – never a good sign.

On our first full day we walk up the Broadwalk in Regent’s Park, determined to see the cherry trees in bloom. The air is warm but the wind is strong and early falling petals carpet the road. People of all ages, colors and persuasions have come to admire and to take pictures of the young trees. We have watched them since their planting and now in their three-year-old adolescence they are giving us courage while bringing joy with their beauty. May it always be so.

Regent’s Park Cherry Trees in bloom

This has been A Letter from A. Broad. Written and read for you by Muriel Murch, and as always supported by murchstudio.com

Truth Bombers

April 28, 2023 / aggiemurch / 2 Comments

Recorded and Produced by Muriel Murch

I’m remembering a Chinese restaurant – probably in Manhattan – it was loud with cooking and cleaning noises from the kitchen and impatient traffic from the street and even then – when we were half our present age – we had to raise our voices to hear each other.

“What we need are Truth Bombers,” said our friend and immediately Walter and George began to expand on the idea. All that was needed were people whose reputations are so strong, so respected, that everyone would listen, believe them, and would act accordingly – doing – as Spike Lee said – The Right Thing. ‘Well that’s all sorted’ we thought as it came time to crack open the fortune cookies. How on earth could we have been so naive?

Now as governments become stronger in their authoritarian rules, there have always been truth bombers who are shot down before they can clip the sharp manicured nails of those iron fists. Truth Bombers come from all walks of life, particularly among artists and their offspring – celebrities, and activists – with politicians far down the list of those who follow this path.

Somehow this has all bubbled up in my mind from another British boil-over – you can’t be serious – the country says – when Boris Johnson, past Prime Minister of bumbling, put his father forward for a seat in the House of Lords where he had already booted his brother Leo to safety.

On 7 March, Gary Lineker spoke out – well, tweeted actually – which now amounts to the same thing – that the language being used around asylum seekers was “Not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s” and that put the government’s knickers in a twist and Lineker off the air. When he first joined the BBC, Lineker had clearly stated that “there are two things that I’ll continue to talk about, the refugee crisis and climate change.” When Lineker was reinstated to Match of the Day the following weekend, the director-general, Mr. Davie, said he had taken “proportionate action”. Adding “We believe we did the right thing. I think I did the right thing.” The row over Lineker’s tweet led to fresh calls for BBC chairman Richard Sharp to resign. After things quieted down, Lineker added: “What they have to think about first and foremost – the government of the day whether it is Tory or Labour – cannot decide who the chairman of the BBC is, or have any kind of influence on who they put in the director of news or anything else – though it looks like another ermine robe could be floating down the BBC’s back staircase.”

The ten-hour flight from San Francisco was as smooth as those things can be. Dear Taghi Amirani met us at Heathrow – driving us into five minutes of sunshine before the grey clouds of England covered the sky over the old A4 road into London. It is a scruffy road, airport hotels sit bossily beside old fields that have been given up and over to scrub and travelers of all kinds. A few plum trees are in blossom and new emerald-green leaves are appearing on the roadside trees. When the sunlight strikes them my spirits lift at this harbinger of spring. Even the houses in Hounslow, that sit directly under the flight paths of so many planes, look fresh and optimistic. Tulips have been planted to follow the daffodils along grass verges. As we come into the city, blackened tree trunks and branches are leafing out saying yes to this season.

Slowly we begin to settle in – unpacking this – rediscovering that and wondering where on earth is the other thing. And we look at the shift in the news items of today. The main themes of course remain the same, corruption by public political figures. Boris and his Papa now receding into the back pages while two Scottish figures from the Scottish National Party were arrested and then released on bail. Last month it was the former chief executive Peter Murrell – husband of Nicola Sturgeon – the recently resigned First Minister of Scotland – and this week the Scottish National Party treasurer Colin Beattie. Then there is the little matter of Rishi Sunak’s wife’s investments in childcare firms not being mentioned on some disclosure forms. Instead, we get to see Rishi and his wife – who wears the taut skin of a supremely rich woman – on the floor – smiling as they appropriate jumbo Lego blocks from nervous children.

Meanwhile, inflation in England is at over 10%, the highest in Western Europe – Brexit – Thank you again. Junior doctors are out on strike for more than their £14 an hour – the supposed living wage in England. The nurses are once more teetering on striking while surgeries and other procedures are being canceled. The National Health System appears to be falling apart which may be the no-longer-hidden goal of this government that put forward a Prime Minister of color as the fall guy.

It is time for the ten o’clock news and though the Scottish indecent party politics lead, followed by a smiling Rishi on the floor with a toddler’s Lego, the main item is the recent trial of the Russian activist and journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza. Murza is Russian and came to England as a teenager, later attending Cambridge University. He worked in journalism before becoming an adviser to Boris Nemtsov, another Russian political opposition leader who was shot and killed in 2015. Murza now lived in the United States with his wife and family. Then later, he wrote from his cell, “We all understand the risk of opposition activity in Russia. But I couldn’t stay silent in the face of what is happening, because silence is a form of complicity”. He has survived two alleged poisoning attempts but at the onset of this war knew that he had to return to Russia where he was immediately arrested and now found guilty of criticizing the war in the Ukraine, spreading “false” information about the Russian army and being affiliated with an “undesirable organization”. all equating treason. He has been sentenced to 25 years in jail, the harshest sentence yet for political dissidents. Along with Russian Alexei Navalny, Belarusian Alex Bialiatski, and others, Vladimir Kara-Murza is a Truth Bomber.

Which brings us to Sir David Attenborough, another truth bomber – Still flying missions – Sir David Attenborough’s new flagship series, Wild Isles, looks at the beauty of nature in the British Isles. Five episodes are currently airing in primetime slots on BBC One. But the sixth episode – a stark look at the losses of nature in the UK and what has caused those declines will only be available on the BBC iPlayer. It is understood to include examples of rewilding, a controversial concept in some deep rightwing circles. Once again the Government’s knickers are in a twist – and all of a sudden it doesn’t seem so far a stretch between rapping Gary Lineker’s knuckles, clipping Sir David’s prime-time wings, and jailing Vladimir Kara-Murza.

This has been A Letter From A. Broad written and produced for you by Muriel Murch.

Step Right This Way

May 27, 2021 / aggiemurch / 1 Comment

Step right this way –

Recorded and Knit together by WSM

And we are back in Belarus. On Sunday when the journalist Roman Protasevich boarded a plane in Greece, he was already nervous, texting back to colleagues that he believed someone was following him. The plane was under an hour away from Vilnius in Lithuania when the announcement came, “This is your captain speaking. We have received information of a possible bomb on board and are to be diverted to Minsk”. As a Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jet, ordered by President Lukashenko, came alongside to escort the Ryanair plane to Minsk, Roman and his girlfriend must have really felt fear. Passengers were taken off the plane, claiming their luggage laid out across the tarmac as the charade continued. But it was Roman Protasevich who was the luggage to be collected by the two Belarusian secret service men also on board the plane. Protasevich was detained, with his girlfriend, accused of organizing last year’s protests against Alexander Lukashenko’s regime. Ryanair said that the situation had been “out of its hands”. The plane was over Belarusian airspace when it was diverted to Minsk though it was closer to the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.

Here Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary, can tut-tut away, grateful that, for this moment at least, we are not a part of the European Union. The US has also joined the tut-tut brigade and most of the responsibility will fall to the slight but firm shoulders of Ursula von der Leyen and the Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki who accused Lukashenko of a “reprehensible act of state terrorism”. As of today European flights are no longer flying over Belarusian airspace and Belarusian planes can no longer fly through Europe. That will be a lot of detours. The incident is alternately described as a hijack and/or a criminal offense, (I’m not sure of the difference) but Alexander Lukashenko doesn’t care. He has got his man and thumbed his nose at Europe and the western world at the same time. This must call for a phone call chuckle and a drink with his chum Vladimir Putin.

There is an English saying, ‘Ash before the oak, in for a soak, oak before the ash, in for a splash’. And so it is proving this May where the Ash tree leaves are already a mature green while the oaks remain delicate and pale. But umbrella raised above the wind and rain we strode out on Sunday, taking the 168 bus down to the the south bank of the river where the wind blew even as the rain stopped. Stepping down to the river from the Waterloo bridge we walked – among people – many still masked – along the banks of Old Father Thames. The river-water was mud-brown with tide hurried wavelets shaking like a dog coming in from a run. The cafes were open, the open-air bookstall up and running outside of the British Film Institute and clean public toilets close by. ‘Spending a Penny’ now costs a pound – no change given. At the bright orange carousel a young man fishes deep into his pockets giving me change for my two pound coin. Someone is making a pretty penny with these necessary facilities.

We walked past the London Eye, looking so huge from the ground, and then under the Westminster Bridge through to the “Wall of Hearts.” Painted on the wall that surrounds St. Thomas’s Hospital it faces the river and the Houses of Parliament. Organized by Matt Fowler, whose father died from the virus, each heart is for another death. To date over 128,000 lives have been lost in the United Kingdom. The 150,000 hearts already painted will be used up soon enough as family members continue to come and write, commemorating the names of their beloveds in all the languages that make up this country.

The wall covers the length of the two old prestigious hospitals Guy’s and St. Thomas’s, now merged as one. Looking high above the wall, there are still old stone arches crumbled and moss-laden leading from the hospital’s beginnings in history through to the buildings of today. May holds Nurses’ Day and I am thinking of Dame Cicely Saunders, who trained here, first as a nurse then as medical social worker and finally as a physician. It was here she pioneered her palliative care treatments before founding St. Christophers Hospice in 1967, expanding to community home care in 1969.

The wall ends bringing us to the Lambeth Bridge and the Lambeth Garden Museum which must wait for another day.

“The BBC is in a dangerous place at the moment, and people like me have a special duty to be careful about what they say,” said Andrew Marr last week. And I can’t even remember what scandal that was about, for now an old chestnut has come back to haunt them.

After 25 years an inquiry has finally been completed into the Martin Bashir 1995 panorama interview with Princess Diana. And this week Prince William spoke publicly. His comments almost bypassing Bashir, going straight to the jugular of the BBC. He called for them to never air the program again and blasted the BBC top brass for presiding over a “cover-up”, rather than lay the blame squarely with rogue reporter Martin Bashir who used fake bank statements to falsely claim Diana’s inner circle were selling information on her to the press. Heads have already begun to roll with resignations here and there. No doubt this will lead to another inquiry, but it will have to wait in line as there are many files already stacked in the constipated bowels of Westminster.

Palace of Westminster UK Parliment from across the river

This has been a Letter from A. Broad.

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch

First aired on Swimming Upstream – KWMR.org.

Web support by murchstudio.com