A Week Ago

November 16, 2024November 16, 2024 / aggiemurch

A week ago on Wednesday.

Written and produced by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side

There was a stillness in the air – The cloud-shielded sky was hiding its sorrow that the world it was covering could well now begin to die. Conversations at the corner cafe were subdued and somber. Nobody was smiling, not even in greetings. Our American friend and neighbor and I sat together nursing our long overdue coffee moment. As we took time to catch up, he spoke of waiting for his Lithuanian passport. What in the world has changed that he is looking forward to a Lithuanian passport?

A lumbering beast has come into the room, lurching forward, knocking against the chessboard where a game is forever in progress. The King has been moved and there is a new guard surrounding him. As the board shudders to a halt, the pawns in the front row of defense are jostling about, each seeking a square of safety. But there is little to be found. Even those soldiers who surround the new King will be knocked off the board before this game is over.

Prime ministers and presidents across the world pick up their phones and press numbers stored on speed-dial. Who will they phone first, the incoming King or the outgoing President? They will make more than one call, many to be denied later in the press, for there are many corners of the board to be covered. For those – like the Taliban – who don’t have phone access, they can always post a tweet on the public notice board marked X. Photographic coverage of war leaders shows a smiling Netanyahu and a serious Zelensky. Putin can’t keep the sly smugness out of his eyes while communication with President Zelensky is paused as support is reconsidered. The UK’s chief of defense staff said approximately 1,500 Russian troops were being killed or injured every day, while the 10,000 soldiers sent from North Korea are already suffering casualties. Now the United Kingdom is looking at its options. Possibly how to honor its word with support while changing what that support could mean. A bribe perhaps? Money rather than weapons – but there is no time for funds to become weapons.

In Gaza there are collapsed corridors of rubble where streets and buildings once stood, leaving families to scrape with their bare hands to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones. While the ‘surrender or starve’ policy has been denied by Israel, earlier this week a military official told BBC reports it had “no intention” of allowing Palestinians to return to their homes in Northern Gaza. There will be no cease-fire in Gaza. Israel will continue with its annihilation of that country.

That was the week that was – or was not – depending on your frame of reference. The English news media continue writing and scurrying around words and projecting policies while the politicians, in England and all over Europe, are shifting their papers and policies as fast as they can. The moral high ground seems to be sinking.

I spent Wednesday and Thursday gnawing on my nails, shredding them to jagged uneven tops. Turning to the drinks cupboard, it was an easy finish of the almost empty sherry, whiskey, and gin bottles. There was not much in them to start with, but upending all three bottles of their dregs was telling. We look around and can only console ourselves with caring for each other.

Neal’s Yard Cheese shop in London by **Frank Fujimoto**

While politics plays out on the world stage, England continues to play out a mix of lorry-like thievery and home-grown purity. The world famous cheese market of Neal’s Yard Dairy was cleanly relieved of 22 tons of cheese in 950 wheels of cheddar valued at £300,000. While the police seriously consider deliveries to Russia or the Middle East, chef Jamie Oliver was more down to earth tweeting, “There has been a great cheese robbery. Some of the best cheddar cheese in the world has been stolen,” and added “If anyone hears anything about posh cheese going for cheap, it’s probably some wrong’uns.”

Ah yes, Some of those wrong’uns for sure. But then there are the 5 % good ‘uns such as Paul Horton, the owner of Apidae Honey in Lincolnshire. Paul sells ‘proper honey’. Not like 90% of the honey tested from retailers selling to supermarkets – all considered suspicious by the British branch of the Honey Authenticity Network.

King Charles III at the Remembrance day Service. The Princess Royal next to him.

This weekend is Remembrance Day Weekend. For the first time in a week the sun is shining. Whenever the date falls, the weekend Friday brings a ‘Festival of Remembrance’ at the Royal Albert Hall with the senior royals all in attendance. The service, filled with traditional music, ends with the first of the two minute silences as paper poppy petals fall on the audience of armed forces and civilians all standing to attention. On Saturday morning the Family comes out once more, leading the nation in remembering those who fought and died in the continued wars we fight. While we follow this remembrance here in England, it is played out in all corners of the British Isles and in Europe.

Sir Keir Starmer joined President Emanuel Macron for the Armistice Day Remembrance in Paris

For the first time since 1944, when Churchill was in Paris, Sir Keir Starmer joined the French President Emanuel Macron for the Armistice Day Remembrance in Paris. They stood together, Sir Keir with his red poppies, Emmanuel with his Blue cornflowers, both symbols of their country’s losses during the wars beyond the first. And in summer, in the cornfields of France and England, those two flowers, the red poppy and blue cornflower grow together, side by side amidst the wheat which is cut down in the harvest of bread and blood. The two minute silence was repeated in at 2 minutes to 11 on the 11th day of the 11th month.

This has been a Letter from A. Broad. Written and Read for you by Muriel Murch

And as always supported by murchstudio.com

Summer’s End

September 17, 2023 / aggiemurch / 4 Comments

Written and recorded by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side.

The summer blasted out with a heatwave that left those of us of a certain age floating in a sea of lethargic sweat. This morning there is a lift in the breeze as brown leaves fall and swirl, crackling underfoot, telling us that autumn has arrived. Children are returning to school, politicians to their chambers, and nobody really knows what is happening in Ukraine. The huge earthquake and toll of over 2,500 deaths in Morocco has blasted the Ukrainian war off the front pages but not completely out of the news.

Widowed 26-year-old Margo sits at her desk inside a small brick mortuary close to the front line in Donetsk. Unknown soldiers are brought for her to check and record what she can about each body. And where she says – she speaks to the dead. “It may sound weird… but I’m the one who wants to apologize for their deaths. I want to thank them somehow. It’s as if they can hear, but they can’t respond.” Ukraine gives no numbers of its war dead – but Margo knows the losses are huge. US officials, quoted by the New York Times, recently put the number at 70,000 dead and as many as 120,000 injured. This from an armed force estimated at only half a million strong.

Crime Watch Live was a BBC weekly program in which the public were asked to help the police solve a crime that has been reported yet remains unsolved. Britain loves this work, it plays into the ancient forest hunter. In Crime Watch the police would put up a situation, giving as much detail as they could and a phone number to call. And sometimes it worked, while the show was still going on ‘a suspect was apprehended and brought in for questioning’. The TV public loved it and so the escape of the ex-army soldier and terror suspect Daniel Khalifa from Wandsworth Prison on Wednesday brought the public out hunting again alongside the police. Daniel is only 21 years old, with an Asian name and light coffee coloring. Dressed as a chef he managed to escape the prison strapped onto the undercarriage of a food delivery truck as it left the prison. I was not the only person with a smile on my face. An ex-prisoner interviewed by the BBC, could not stop grinning as he said. “He’s off out of here now.” But it was not to be. 75 hours after dangling under the truck out of Wandsworth Prison he was pushed off of his bike by an undercover police officer while cycling the towpath by the Union Canal in Chiswick. While Daniel faces the law on Monday it is time to point a finger of blame at someone. The finger circulates around and comes to rest on the conservative government as the country pays the price for another slice of the Austerity measures put in place by George Osbourne and David Cameron. On BBC radio, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth affairs James Cleverly, previously secretary for Education – so it’s not clear how much he really knows – claimed there was no evidence that cuts imposed by his government were to blame because, “the number of escapes had decreased dramatically, while “4,000 extra prison officers” had been recruited. To which the Prison Officers Association national chair, Mark Fairhurst, rebutted that the Prison Service was “now unable to retain the staff we recruit. That tells you everything about the working conditions in our prisons.” And blamed the escape on “The link goes back to 2010, when the Tory government came into power and hit us all with austerity measures.”

But this little bit of amusement is only one part of the austerity chickens coming home to roost.

As children put on their uniforms, several schools will be closed due to those chickens roosting. Construction codes were loosened in the 1980s and 90s and buildings built during those years are now crumbling apart from the light-weight, porous, cheaper, easier concrete. Classrooms are getting soaked through in the rains and even clumps of ceilings are falling down in classrooms. The hold-your-breath not-said-yet page-turner are those other buildings – hospitals, apartment blocks, offices – built during that boom – and is going to be a very big problem once someone puts the question to the government. Which is maybe why the Prime Minster nipped off to India for the G20 summit. Better to be shunned and dissed by world leaders than hounded in parliament. It’s tricky for Rishi and he really has no way out. There is no one else to blame for the state of the nation but the Conservative government and everybody knows it. And Rishi will have to show up in parliament soon.

The King and Queen must also come down from the highlands and back to London. The King managed a few weeks away in his beloved Scotland, to take the time to honour his mother and reflect on the first year of his reign as he moves forward. Where now can he now shine a careful light without poking his finger into politics? It is rumored that his first big personal project is a national initiative to tackle food waste. The Evening Standard newspaper – which reports a surprising amount of truth – writes that 2.9 million tons of good-to-eat farm produce, enough to provide the equivalent of seven billion meals, is being dumped in landfills each year. And you can be sure that more than one someone is making a profit from that.

This caption quote is from ‘Left Foot Forward’
The campaign to hand out EU flags at the Last Night of the Proms was spearheaded by the Thank EU for the Music group, which said that “tens of thousands of music lovers have taken our free European flags into the Royal Albert Hall for each Last Night of the Proms in solidarity with musicians who feel (like countless others) the destructive impact of Britain’s recent isolation from Europe.”
The group also posted a letter it had sent to the BBC’s Director General Tim Davie on its Facebook Page, where it added: “Our flags represent the hope that the Last Night of the Proms musically celebrates “Britannia ruling the airwaves”, hopefully transforming the problematic post-colonial anthems into something more, shall we say, enlightened and collaborative?”

The Promenade Concerts from the Royal Albert Hall ended this weekend. The last night of the Proms usually concludes with a roar of British national fever but this year it was pitched a little differently and though ending with the usual Rule Britannia – sounding a little tired – the National Anthem – God Save the King and For Auld Lang Syne while people stood swaying together singing along in harmony. But there were as many European Union flags and berets in the audience as there were Union Jacks. Members of the Government are asking for another investigation by the BBC but it could be – that just like the late Queen before them – with her clear message hat, the people are speaking calling for a greater self than just this treasured Isle.

`The Late Queen at the opening of Parliament 2017

September 8th marks a year since the late Queen died. An evening program set out the timeline of the day leading up to her death. Little nooks and crannies of tit-bit information came to light as we watched and remembered that day and our Queen. While the Queen’s condition became more grave, the then Prince of Wales took himself off for a solitary walk in the forest as he began to prepare himself for what lay ahead. This program was a moment for the nation to reflect on the passing of a beloved monarch and mother, a person who affected all of our lives, like remembrance prayers for all of our dearly departed. Years ago coming to All Hallows Eve, St.Michaelmas – of the daisy and the dead – an old friend wrote to ask if I would like my mother’s name included in the prayers for the dead at St. Paul’s Cathedral. It was an unexpected act of kindness and a remembrance of all things past. And we do remember them, those we knew, those we loved, and those who taught us life lessons. We will remember them until we become among those who are remembered.

This has been A Letter from A. Broad.

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch

Divas and Dingies

July 27, 2023 / aggiemurch / 2 Comments

Divas and Dingies Recorded and produced by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side

The writer Milan Kundera has died at the age of 94. It is noted with a passing sentence or two in the papers, a mention on the evening news and a few more paragraphs in obituaries in England and Europe. Salman Rushdie took a quote from ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” And this is why there are novels, poems, songs and biographies of work and of people written – to hold onto what we know as true for as long as possible remembering the stepping stones that were laid down for our work and we provide for those that follow.

And as that came to mind, a seventeen-year-old granddaughter stepped through the cottage doors for a visit with her now ‘over 80’ grandparents and we had things to do. Two bus rides took us to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the exhibit of Divas. Headphones in place we were ushered down the darkened steps to Gallery 40, first into the world of opera with the costumes and cracked voice of Maria Callas. Moving from window to window for the first time I look on these early opera singers as brave and courageous women paving their own pathways for independence for singers and actresses to follow. Billie Holliday is shown in a photographic negative of her only performance at the Albert Hall in 1954. Between the flickering pictures of Theda Bara playing the first Cleopatra on film in 1917, we pass display cases showing those who were destroyed by the systems they tried to conquer: Marilyn Monroe, and Judy Garland are seen smiling bravely. Then comes Elizabeth Taylor playing the same queen Cleopatra in 1963 as she commands Mark Anthony to kneel before her. It’s beautiful stuff and when I emerge from the darkness – the exhibit continues upstairs – there are the brilliant costumes of Prince, Cher, Elton John and countless others. I can make it around the exhibit once before I get dizzy with all this courage displayed before me. As the granddaughter goes around and around I sit and think of these divas – of female and male inclinations – all pushing the boundaries of their times. Within this exhibit are the milestones that bring us from Marie Callas to Marian Anderson performing at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, to the civil rights movement, through Cher, Elton John to the Beyoncé of today.

Theda Bara as Cleopatra in 1917 from the Diva Exhibit

We find our way to the old tea rooms with their tiled walls, porcelain columns and stained glass windows. There are far too many pastries and not enough small plates of good-for-you food but we slide a pot of tea and scones onto a tray and manage a tea-time moment to sit down and take in what we have seen and look about us – at old and young England with some European and Asian families who are also taking this moment to pause and refresh. I am caught seeing a young Japanese family sitting at a table close by, parents with a slightly older daughter and the younger brother who is having trouble with his broccoli. His father helps him out – spooning some strands of vegetable back into the boy’s mouth and scraping some away to his own plate. But it is the mother who is striking. She sits calmly, casually watchful as a lioness teaching her young cubs to eat for themselves. Her face is long and strictly angular, half of her black hair is pulled back and held roughly high on her head with a band. The angle of her jaw, the rise of her hair are ancient and familiar both.

*Popen o Fuku Musume* (“Young woman blowing a *poppen* glass”), which appears under both series titles of c. 1792–93

Since childhood, I have seen her on the pages of books of paintings of Japanese art and culture but here she is in the 21st century – utterly beautiful in her casual modern clothes. I wonder at this Japanese family so seemingly on vacation in England, visiting the week that the Oppenheimer film opens to worldwide audiences. What history are they reliving as they come here?

Meanwhile, summer’s slow tides are ebbing and flowing with little wavelets rippling through our political history. Because of the obtuse behaviour on the one hand and downright disgraceful on another, three conservative members of Parliament have had to resign their seats in government and go back to oiling their lawnmowers in the countryside. Three countywide elections were held in one night. Uxbridge and South Ruislip did bring home another conservative with Steve Tuckwell. Keir Mather took a Labour seat in Selby and Ainsty while Somerset and Frome chose a woman, Sarah Dyke, for the Liberal Democrats, nice little wins for the Labour and Liberal Democratic parties each. It is small potatoes given what is going on in England and the world but they are potatoes. Desks will be shuffled, phones re-arranged, email accounts set up along with new websites – all promising to right what is wrong with this country – at the moment. And though those promises will hardly be fulfilled they could indeed change the way forward just enough to tack this listing boat of a country onto a kinder course.

And we so need this with the sight of the Bibby Stockholm barge anchored off of Portland Harbour in Dorset – though registered at Bridgetown Barbados. It is now refurbished to hold 506 single men who arrived in Kent seeking UK Asylum. The men are called asylum seekers – not refugees – and it is a reminder of when we were called registered aliens rather than immigrants, and that language is important. As well as the 506 asylum seekers there are 18 – trained to Military standards (whatever that means) security guards along with cooks and cleaners to a total staff of 60. It is a floating prison for want of a better word – a ship to discourage sea-faring migrants from crossing to this small Island.

The Bibby Stockholm docked in the Portland Harbour awaiting 506 asylum seekers.

Whatever they say about it – and they try to say a lot – the idea of putting 506 young men in a boat with only 60 more to lend a helping hand providing essentials, may not have the same outcome as the owl and the pussycat who sailed out to sea – in a beautiful pea-green boat.

This has been A Letter From A. Broad. Written and read for you by Muriel Murch.