Rain Stops Play

May 21, 2021 / aggiemurch

Recorded and Knit together by WSM

The third week in May – and it is still raining steadily. Umbrella in hand, it was time to take the 274 bus into town. The bus was already half full, so I sat upstairs to look down over the London streets and see a group of young Asian men, carrying their hefty bags full of cricket gear on their way to the park. One is already dressed in his Cricket whites. Do they dream of one day playing in the holy of holies, Lord’s Cricket Grounds close by in St. John’s Wood? Founded in 1788 by Thomas Lord, the grounds were moved at least three times before settling into this corner of Marylebone. Noted historical progressions through the years included that in 1864 the purchase of a lawn mower removed the need to keep sheep. Those young men I saw from my bus would have been in the grounds where my father was a member for all of his adult life.

I arrived at the edge of the city to where, even with the soft rain falling, the pubs’ and restaurants’ outdoor tables are full. Most shops have been opened again on the Marylebone High Street, but with some noticeable gaps where high-end English brands used to sit proudly on their corner lots. They were always just out of my price range and I am not as sympathetic as I could be.

On Monday, more lockdown restrictions were eased but we are going slowly, being sensible, as the health Minister Matt Hancock urges us all to be. But maybe there will be some lightening of the infection load that will bring this, and other countries, safely out of hibernation.

Every country is looking at what their government could have done better, safer, faster to save more lives. Doors, gateways, air pathways and sea-channels have been opened and closed with speeds that relate to the economy as much as infection rates. All governments have behaved badly to various degrees. There have been profiteers and deals of equipment, and devious deals of no equipment. Last week the head of a pharmaceutical firm in India fled to London after failing to provide more affordable vaccines to his own country. The blame? Already shifted to Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister for not booking ahead and placing his order. The high numbers of infection rates and still low numbers of vaccines are struggling to meet on a world-wide level.

Over this year and half, the COVID-19 virus has been named and shamed as the Chinese, the Kent and now the Indian variant and – as it was named – so it fled to greener pastures. It must have been obvious to any epidemiologist that the Virus would change and mutate as the opportunity arose. That’s what viruses do. They are as opportunistic as all living beings. The Times newspaper estimated that at least 20,000 passengers from India were allowed to enter the UK because there was a trade deal in the works and a little hop to India would have got Boris out of his wallpaper dilemma . The Daily Mirror called Boris Johnson’s delay on closing travel from India another unforgivable ‘Own Goal’.

Another news item broke this week, one that many of us have been looking for. Andrew Marr, the BBC political broadcaster, whom we regularly watch with a Sunday Sofa breakfast, said he may leave the corporation so he can share his true views on politics. Speaking in Glasgow with the Scottish journalist Ruth Wishart, he said, ‘At some point, I want to get out and use my own voice again. How and when, I have no idea …. There are many privileges of working at the BBC, including the size of the audience and all of that, but the biggest single frustration by far is losing your own voice, not being able to speak in your own voice.’ Constraints such as this are a knife edge that all paid journalists must traverse, admitting the constraints is another.

For eight days and counting we have watched Israeli airstrikes and Hamas rocket barrages that have killed over 200 hundred people, the vast majority of them Palestinian women and children. Hospital buildings, schools and media centers have been bombed to rubble with Palestinians running, searching for their dead children. The heavy metal disparities are impossible to ignore. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave no justification for targeting the 12-story press building in Gaza, though later claimed that Hamas had an intelligence unit inside. No news organization using the building had seen evidence of Hamas presence. He went on, “Israel’s military operation against Palestinian Hamas militants in Gaza will continue with full force. We are acting now, for as long as necessary, to restore calm… It will take time,” Mr Netanyahu warned. Time, to right which wrong?

1978 was the awards season for the film Julia, directed by Fred Zinneman and staring Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda and Jason Robards. Julia was up for eight nominations including for best editor and so we were there that night. Sitting aways away, (Walter’s chances of winning were not considered high) Vanessa looked very young, and alone as she scampered up onto the stage to be greeted by an even bouncier John Travolta. Graciously she accepted her Oscar and then spoke: quietly, politely but with great purpose, her memorable speech denounced what she saw as the Zionist disturbers of that time. That speech cost her a full blown career in Hollywood, thus allowing all of the richness of her work in the cinematic and theatre arts to flow through different channels. Listening again to that speech from 1978 while looking to the now scant news screens, tragically darkened by this new wave of Israeli and Palestinian bombing of the land that is Gaza and Holy – I wonder when will the world be able to bow our heads in prayer – together again.

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

May Day

May 6, 2021 / aggiemurch / 5 Comments

Recorded and Knit together by WSM

“What was the first foreign country you visited?” asks my computer as I enter yet another protected website. “France” I type in and think back on that first visit, when spring and love were beginning, and April in Paris was not just a song. Wearing an oatmeal-colored Jaeger suit of a little box jacket and the skirt that just touched my knees, I nervously boarded an AirFrance plane at London Heathrow Airport. Looking back I realize that the elegant gentleman sitting beside me was remaining extremely courteous as he escorted me through the departure gate – though he quickly faded away when he saw a very lean young man in pinstriped jeans and a cocky hat hiding by a pillar, watching and waiting for me. It was spring of 1964 and I had just turned 21 years old, about to enjoy two weeks of spring-time in Paris and the acceptance of what has turned out to be a very long love affair.

Though the love affair endures, the spring-time weather has spun out of control and this May Day weekend the wind whipped cherry blossoms off the trees with a cruel beating. It is difficult to see how any bee can make it to the blossoms and scatter their fruit-inducing pollen. A friend tells me that in France on May Day people give bouquets of Lilly of the Valley to their friends and family. They are tokens of appreciation and to bring happiness and good luck. The Lilly of the Valley bulbs I planted last autumn are sadly slow and shy. The leaves are only now just unfolding above the ground.

The May Day bank holiday pays tribute to workers and unions across the world and May 1st is known as International Workers’ Day. Not that at the moment the banks in Britain need a holiday. Most High Street branches have taken the COVID crisis as a time to comb through low lying employees, cutting their on-site staff and reducing their always short counter hours to four a day. There is no union help for the bank staff on this Bank Holiday.

MayDay has another meaning. The “Mayday Mayday Mayday” call of distress from a plane or a ship originated over a hundred years ago in the 1920s. Frederick Stanley Mockford was a radio officer at London’s Croydon Airport. He was asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and be easily understood by all pilots and ground staff during an emergency. In those days much of the traffic at the Croydon airport was to and from Le Bourget Airport in Paris. Mockford came up with “Mayday” derived from the French word “m’aider” that means “help me” a shortened form of “venez m’aider”, “come and help me”.

Now there are different reasons to call out MayDay, as talks are discretely held and whispered through the corridors of power in the capitals of Britian, Iran, and the United States.

Nazanin Zaghari-Radcliffe is not the only dual national citizen held in prison in Iran, but here in Britain her case is the most visible. Finishing one five-year term in prison she is now staying at her parents’ home in Tehran waiting for release or a return to prison. Having completed her sentence for alleged spying she has been rearrested on fresh false charges. If she loses her appeal against this new conviction, she will face another year in jail and a further 12 months in which she is not allowed to leave the country.

Foreign Minister Dominic Raab has finally spoken out saying “It is difficult to argue against the suggestion that Nazanin is being held ‘state hostage’ and her treatment amounts to torture.” For the first time Raab said her fate was now tied not just to a £400 million debt that the UK government owes to Iran but also the outcome of talks in Vienna on the future of the 2015 Iranian nuclear deal. “We’ve said that the debt is something we want to have resolved,” Nazanin remains the pawn in this chess game of flesh and coin. America is, naturally, also mixed up in this discussion. There is the little matter of four Americans, and the release of $7 billon of Iranian assets held in foreign bank accounts since 1979, and which sanctions the US is prepared to lift in return for Iran coming back into full compliance with the nuclear deal. International talks in Vienna will end at the beginning of June, not very far away, and by then the Iranian presidential election campaign will have begun.

Pay the Debt. Is it really too much to ask? Britain, like other imperialistic powers tries to wiggle out of debts owned, using whatever is at their disposal, wether it be a mere £ 400 million to Iran or £58,000 for refurbishing a ministerial apartment.

Then there is the guilt, or not, of leaving a lover from whom you have used all they have to give as we watch the continents of India, Africa and South America burn up with the hot rasp of breath from the parched dry lungs of their people who go without oxygen.

What tidbits can be tossed our way to distract us from these global tragedies? From May 17th the UK government has given us unlimited mourners at funerals, moving the stored bodies along from over-filled mortuaries. For weddings there remains a limit of 30 people until June, while crowds and their cash, later to count the cost, are already returning to select outdoor football matches, indoor snooker tournaments, and concerts around the country.

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

Fires that Smolder and Burn

April 29, 2021 / aggiemurch

Recorded and Knit together by WSM

In India the cremation vats are burning continuously as undertakers and priests work as hard as the doctors, nurses and all the health carers. Oxygen tanks are being rolled off of lorries and loaded onto carts as relatives try to help their families at home. There is no room in the hospitals of Delhi or Mumbai and other major cities.The black market is doing a fierce trade in oxygen while fake medicines are being manufactured and sold as quickly as any that are real.

US President Joe Biden is shipping off 60 million doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine to India. Not that America would have been using them any time soon as the AstraZeneca vaccine has not been approved in the US. It’s a start and other countries around the world that have a clear but discrete ‘me first’ policy are bending a little and offering help with formulas and ingredients for factories in India to manufacture their own vaccines.

India is a sprawling continent with its own ways of being that is often hard for westerners to understand. All continents are tricky, and swayed by the personalities of the men and women in power and who cling to that power. They are so big and hold so many diverse opinions that it is often impossible within a democracy to turn the tide to bring safety to those shores. In autocratic states such as China and Russia there are other difficulties. Islands are easier to contain, especially if you have a sensible woman at the head of government such as Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand.

The fate and state of India under its pandemic situation has pushed other countries’ political dilemmas off of the news media and onto the back-burner of our minds. We are only dimly aware that Alexei Navalny has stopped his hunger strike, and that opponents to the overruling political parties in Hong Kong are being quietly jailed.

As India burns its dead, our Prime Minister is refurbishing the flat above number 11 Downing Street with new wall paper, while he is seen out feeding lambs in the Yorkshire Dales or playing ping-pong table tennis in a factory. Neither is a pretty sight. And parliamentary ministers are leaping up and down asking very pointed questions: not about helping India, or even updates on the UK Covid policies, but who is paying for the wallpaper? Sometimes ‘Little England’ beggars belief. As we look on the blackmarket sales of oxygen and medication in India, are they really any different from the UK government’s Covid contracts awarded in 2020 through VIP lanes jotted down somewhere for who gets what contracts? How is this different from Street Black Markets? Maybe only in style.

People are dying in the thousands in India and this country is riding a roller coaster following the antics of David Cameron and Boris Johnson tripping over their own shoelaces running through the halls of power and out the other side. So we are left at the moment wondering and gossiping about who paid for the wallpaper at number 11, as if Boris Johnson and this family are going to stay there for a while. The power behind the Prime Minister’s throne is shifting in the back bedroom and it is unclear who is going to hold the reins on this donkey and guide him through the narrowing streets of London’s power. Will it be Carrie Symonds his fiancé, partner, girlfriend or Dominic Cummings the advisor with short sight but looking over the long view, or one of those Tory politicians seen to be “not seen” at this moment in time.

Headlining the Daily Mail paper this weekend, one senior minister was quoted, and then it was naturally denied by another, that last October at a Downing Street meeting Boris Johnson said “No more ***** lockdowns – let the bodies pile high in their thousands.”

But now, while Boris Johnson denies and flounders in the shallow waters of who paid for how much wall-paper, other tossed-off foolish remarks made when he was foreign secretary remain a serious blot on Britian’s foreign policies. In 2016 Iranian officials cited Johnson’s words that ‘Nazanin Zaghari-Radcliffe was teaching people journalism in Iran’, as evidence that she had engaged in “propaganda against the regime”. Returning from visiting her mother in Tehran, she was arrested and jailed for ‘spreading such propaganda’ a charge that is hotly denied by her, her family and the British government. Having completed her five years in jail, the Iranian courts have now sentenced her to another year with a further year’s travel ban. Nazanin is but a pawn, placed on a hot square of the chess board, caught between Iran’s strong Queen and Britian’s slow moving King. She is encircled and held captive for a long overdue debt of four hundred million pounds owed to Iran that may never get paid. Nazanin is one woman, one wife, one mother set to serve one more year – if she can.

Three years ago a young Iranian friend, Fateme, give me a pair of red Iranian earrings. They are bright and pretty and similar to a pair that Nazanin is seen wearing in early pictures before she was taken prisoner. Foolishly, or not, I wear them trying with the strength of one woman’s love to bring another courage for the year ahead.

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