Winston Churchill | Muriel Murch

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

Recorded and knit together by WSM
Aired on KWMR.org June 17 2020

After three months in lockdown it was time to venture beyond NW1 deeper into the city at West 2. My audiologist was working through his waiting list of patients and my name came up. With two small children at home, he was, frankly, happy to be working.

“The 274 bus will take you to Marble Arch and then it is a five minute walk.” But running late I hailed a taxi. The cabbie kept his windows open and I my mask and gloves on. Late but not too late, I followed Mark into his back room wondering how is this going to work. But the appointments are spaced 15 minute apart to clean the rooms. He took a brief history and looked at my old aides, trying to hide his amazement.
“These are 9 years old.”

Into the box I go and testing begins. The spacing between beeps is far too long. This is not good. Nor is his final verdict, “You might want to tell your children. And these,” he concludes looking again at my old friends, “are no longer Fit for Purpose.”

He sets me up anew and I will read the directions several times to get the best out of my National Health aides. My fingers are crossed and my glasses adjusted hoping that these new friends will ‘See me out.’

Not Fit for Purpose. One thing to say that about an old, but still working, appliance, but a little different for a person.

Though stooped low with osteoporosis, Howard still walks as if about to run. Under his scruffy black cap his sparse, long hair flows behind him. Howard was a fine tennis coach in the small sports center at the north end of Regent’s Park. There were four tennis courts, a golf practice range and cricket nets. But a fresh administration, a clean sweep with a new broom, and the golf and tennis areas were cleared away to increase wilderness for the hedgehogs. A catering hub was built overlooking the newly laid out cricket and football pitches now there was money saved and money earned.

The little tennis club at the other end of the park grew, attracting sweet young things and handsome jocks. And the staff had to fit that look. Howard and his Russian friend did not make the cut and his friend was so devastated he committed suicide. Howard manfully struggles on. Now as his knees and heart age he often stops to rest on his hurried walks back from the village. In this coronavirus loneliness he feels keenly ‘Unfit for Purpose’.

George Floyd’s murder has brought much of the world to attention and the last two weekends in England have been marked with protest marches for ‘Black Lives Matter’ and the BAME communities. And once again the protests have been mucked about by nationalists looking for a good ‘bust up.’ There is no football, no beer and few jobs. Ironically, Nazi Nationalists are seen defending Churchill’s statue while a very buff Patrick Hutchinson tosses an older white skin-head over his shoulder, because, as he said, ’He was separated and needed to get back to his people.’

Patrick Hutchinson rescues a white nationalist Photo credit the Wimbledon Times

When Edward Colston’s statue was pulled from his pinnacle in Bristol, graffitied, today’s version of tarred and feathered – then rolled and tossed into the harbour from whence landed his slave trading fortune, people began to look around. Who else glorified a past built on the enslavement of others for the enrichment of trade? Even Oxford University faced its mixed messages of Cecil Rhodes and Nelson Mandela. “We are going to have to work together now you and I” Mandela said to the statue when he set up the Mandela Rhodes Trust in 2003 to help heal racial divisions.

In London, Winston Churchill’s doomed statue stands on Parliament Square. One weekend graffitied and the next – to protect and possibly buy time – he was boxed up. One couldn’t help smiling – just a little – at the irony of this move. Boris Johnson huffing and puffing that his hero Winston Churchill had to be put in a box and that Sadiq Khan, the son of a London bus driver and now major of London after Boris, was the one to do it. Surely even Boris might have a glimmer of understanding that these statues, even that of his beloved Winston, might now be considered Not Fit for Purpose. This week’s attention is on Clive of India – another dastardly (the word fits) fellow, who is tucked away in Whitehall.

But how do we remember history? How do we teach it, respecting what was good while acknowledging the mostly unrecognized, unspoken atrocities that each and every country inflicts on those who stand in their way or from whom they can benefit?

Typically Johnson has proclaimed ‘A committee will be formed to review race relations’. Some in government will laugh and chuckle, while those in minority communities across the country will weep with resignation at this announcement. Reviews after racial incidents have been happening since race relations began to overtake class inequalities in import. It has been hard to track the snail’s pace of change in this country. But maybe this can be the time, as families from the countries we have plundered march and kneel together, to keep pressure on this government to look again, not only at the statues but in the class-rooms and work to do more for an England that is ‘Fit For Purpose’ in today’s world.

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