Glasgow away day 29-30 April 2015

Dawn and dusk from Premier Inn near George Square. Looking south over River Clyde with twenty or more wind turbines on horizon.  George Square is like the Trafalgar Square of Glasgow.

Riots Rebellions and Protests – A Walk around Colchester town

The walk on Sat 2 May 2015, 2pm-4pm, was led by Dorian Kelly and started at Slack Space, Old Police Station, 35 Queen Street, Colchester CO1 2PQ. It was part of janeswalk.org 2015, which is hosted locally by Walk Colchester.  It featured the High Street (Castle Park Memorial end, scene of the Poll Tax riots in 1990) and a speech by John Ball and a song about him (both now on my Youtube channel) and much more. Here is the ad for the walk:

Leek+potato soup

Good Housekeeping Step By Step Vegetarian Cookbook page 104

You Tube Off Line

YouTube has a new free sub, lasting 6 months, where you can download videos to view off line. Very useful for people like me who like to watch/listen on a smartphone in a wifi zone. It means you can watch/listen to stuff out and about, where using 3G connection would, in my case for example, soon exhaust my monthly subs limit. It also means you don’t get the stop/start stutter when watching/listening in the wifi zone.

Climate change will destroy the planet! – Really?

Full of the evangelism of reading This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate by Naomi Klein (for my book group), I made the mistake recently of telling a friend how capitalism and its consequences would destroy the planet. He told me I was wrong. Of course he is right.

Non-fiction Book Group

With a few friends I recently started a Book Group to read non-fiction books and meet once a month on a Friday evening. On the agenda so far (but not necessarily read by all!): -

I am Malala

I read this over Easter* and broadly agree with this Guardian review. I hadn’t realised Malala was already an international star long before her attempted assassination: she’d already won a national peace prize and written a blog for the BBC that was meant to be anonymous but didn’t really remain so for long.

 

The Taliban shooting must be one of the most back-firing attacks in history. The Taliban catapulted Malala to international superstardom. Violence can sometimes be the most counter-productive thing a terrorist can do. To give another example relevant to this story, it’s like the CIA funding and backing Al-Qaeda (after the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan) which back-fired in that it helped create both the Taliban and the suicide bombers who were able to bomb the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. 

Poem on dialysis

Days and moments slowly dragging

Only two more hours to go

Some days that can seem a lifetime

some say it’s a friend,  but it feels like a foe

Since WW2 USA has bombed 21+ countries: New Internationalist

Since the Second World War
THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
has bombed 21 countries

Green Party Election Broadcast 1997

 Still eerily pertinent today