The Mirror warned that Britain yesterday was to be hotter than Barbados and the Sahara. The Telegraph offered readers a range of alarms and advice:
• Stop staff travelling in rush hour, health officials urge
• Britain braced for hottest day in a decade
• Heatwave could buckle train tracks and melt roads, travellers warned
• What men should wear to work during a heatwave
• UK heatwave in pictures: Scorching weather sears Britain Continue reading The hottest July day on record
I have just returned from a month-long holiday in Sicily and Crete. What I felt there, over and over, was the awe-inspiring presence of time. It was in the landscape of 400 year-old dry-stone walling; it was in a Greek theatre in a field of poppies; it was in streets with layers of civilizations visible in the walls of buildings. Continue reading Time, Crete and Sicily, April – May 2015
I know you are suffering. You tell me that you feel broken, exhausted. Your horizons are diminished. You feel as though you have lost a better self and have no way to regain it. In spite of the specialists, the doctors, herbalists, clinicians, the diets and disciplinary regimes, a cure eludes you. You are beginning to despair. I can hear the anguish in your voice, the distress on your face, when we speak about your condition. You are suffering.
At times you see your illness as the cause of your suffering. It is the insurmountable obstacle that prevents you from realising your true, happier, self. At others, you blame yourself for not being able to accept your condition and forge a life within it. You see your suffering as a sign of failure: your great and perpetual failure to be happy. As if happiness was an achievement. As if us non-sufferers were somehow better at living than you. Continue reading Letter to a friend
I started writing this on Anzac Day, 2014, and the Sydney Morning Herald was carrying a story entitled ‘On a foreign field a girl remembers the fallen’:
An Australian schoolgirl unexpectedly wells up with tears over a nameless Fromelles gravestone. Zoe Bell, 17, of St Leonard’s College in Melbourne, isn’t usually like this, her teacher tells me. This isn’t hysteria or histrionics. Just history.
Here in northern France, the numbers and politics and clichés of a century-old war fall away, and the reality of it rises from the ground like the thick local fog. Its meaning chills you so sharply that it can force water from the most cynical, surprised eyes.
All those dead. On this soil, it doesn’t take a supernatural imagination to sense their presence.
There are a multitude of Zoes on the Western Front right now. Swarms of coaches buzz from one cemetery to the next.
(Joe Barton, SMH 25/4/2014, pg 7)
