Empty Saturday

Empty as in devoid.
Neighbours are heading for Florida in August, barely anyone visible. A Sunday pretending to be otherwise. 

By 1PM, stunned people try to drive cars, but little has changed. 

More distant neighbours are getting work visas for the US and will disappear.

I'm sure the light changes at this time - August and a long way north - there's a catch in the light, an angle, a temperature, a shadow. 

Just a sense of time passing further away.

Bookface

I've avoided BookFace for a while, about a month. It's now peppered with "suggested pages", ads and nonsense. The nonsense is mainly human created, trivia dug from the trivia mines and "shared". Selfies, the red hot news that America is a shit hole run by racists and at risk of electing one as president. A thin spray of helpless references to conflicts we can only experience in nightmares or in 12 second bursts on BookFace.

And endless yakking and holiday snaps and phone videos.

And then I find that a real human being who I actually know [not virtually] is leaving and going to Ethiopia and has invited me and many others for a farewell drink, tonight! As in TODAY! Lauren Elliott, maybe 24, going back to Ethiopia for the 3rd time. 

Young people! I wish I was 40 years younger, I honour and respect them for actually doing and not just wishing.

Paradox.

Hospital

Hospital

I've been three times in the past 3 weeks, more than for decades. Last week I tripped and fell on our allotment, a short and clumsy pirouette into a gooseberry bush and onto scaffold boards. 

Cuts to my head from the gooseberry thorns, skin ripped off my arms by the boards. And a chance to lie in the contents of the water butt for some extra muddiness. Jill took me to the Minor Injuries Clinic at the main hospital. 

I was patched up, given antibiotics and a tetanus shot. I walked out with renewed faith in the NHS and in the human race. Today I went back because the arm wounds looked a bit odd. We sat waiting while Sky News reported on Syria, men running with body bags in shrieking heat, kids running after parents. No one looked at the camera.

It was the Oh Dear moment again, the helpless passive observer distracted into someone else's misery. 

The report ended with Kerry and Lavrov doing their statesmen dance in front of flags in a cool dry dust free unbombed room surrounded by journalists and a small army of minders. The definition of helplessness is to be dependent on people like Kerry and Lavrov to solve  Syria. They will only ever solve their version of the problem; the mild embarrassment of people being destroyed wholesale by assorted psychopathic organisations, from Daesh to the Syrian State via the Turkish State and the Russian State and the Iranian State and the American State. With my mild discomfort and slight worry and tiny wait, we watched until we couldn't any more, moving across the waiting area so Sky News was just a silent pale blue wash over the wall.

Driving home in the pale northern drizzle to coffee and a cigarette, and the opportunity to comment on the barbarity and waste, and to never appear on Sky News while not looking at the camera.

Checking the phone

Checking the phone

I've found myself checking the phone, pointlessly. I look at a news feed in fear, of another atrocity, hoping to be relieved of having to worry that it's going to happen. The filtered instantaneous written and fact checked; the "How has .....affected you?" column.

And the phone stops ringing.

Two days later, you notice it's on silent. 

Small scale creeping nonsense.