Of course it is not that long ago that we were all used to dial up speeds (remember that annoying connection noise?)- but these days 1.9 meg is pretty slow. I am currently getting about 54 KB/sec.
But I am just back from a night in Glasgow, where Michaela and I went to see Jools Holland (Sorry- not really my cup of tea, talented though the band were) and then we spent a day shopping in the city.
It was lovely to walk a city with my wife, but it was so busy. Cars everywhere, fighting for a few inches of space, and to be a few seconds faster away from the lights.
So it was good to get the ferry over to the place where even cyber space has been slowed down.
International charities Cord and Tearfund have linked up to bring you Toilet Twinning: a unique way to help transform lives in poor communities across the world.
Since the launch of Toilet Twinning in 2008, more than 1,500 latrines have been built in Burundi – providing safe loos for at least 9,000 people! So… squat’s it all about?
There’s a serious message here though-
up a stink
It’s out of order! 1 in 3 people across the world don’t have somewhere safe to go to the toilet. Bad sanitation is one of the world’s biggest killers: it hits women, children, old and sick people hardest. Every minute, three children under the age of five die because of dirty water and poor sanitation. And, right this minute, around half the people in the world have an illness caused by bad sanitation.
Women and girls suffer most
In Africa, half of young girls who drop out of school do so because they need to collect water – often from many miles away – or because the school hasn’t got separate toilets for boys and girls. Not having a loo puts people at risk of being bitten by snakes as they squat in the grass and makes women and girls a target for sexual assault as they go to the toilet in the open.
Big job
We must do what we can to make a difference.
Providing people with clean water and basic sanitation is one of the most cost-effective ways to release people from poverty: for every £1 spent on water and sanitation, £8 is returned through saved time, increased productivity and reduced health costs.
Missing the target
In 2000, 189 countries from across the world signed up to the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. The plan was that we’d all work together to end extreme poverty by 2015. But little action means some targets will be missed by DECADES. If we carry on like this, it’s predicted we won’t hit the sanitation target in sub-Saharan Africa until the 23rd century.
So if anyone wants to buy us a toilet twin for our downstairs loo, I will forever more poo with pride!
I was driven by a desire to do a job that had at its very centre the desire to help other people. I think this was driven by a number of things- my own troubled childhood, a social conscience that was stoked by a progressive education and perhaps above all, my faith.
It was a mix of motivations that I have never quite escaped- despite the frequent screaming frustrations of working within a bureaucracy, and the early disillusionment with the idealism of being a genuine change agent- working both within and against the state.
It survived the huge pressure of work in inner city Greater Manchester with people in mental health crisis- in what could be a very scary, violent place. It survived because I met some wonderful people, and there was value in kindness and caring, even if I often felt impotent and ineffectual when faced with such overwhelming need.
It survived work as a therapist in GP surgeries- seeing 6-7 people a day with a wide variety of brokenness. Along the way I became more aware of my own brokenness- and aspired to become a wounded healer.
It survived a move to Scotland, and an encounter with a different kind of stress- where the busyness was driven by isolation and lack of resources over a wide rural area.
It has even survived a move into management, with all the power mongering and encounters with the sociopaths.
But under the recent onslaught, the flame flickers dimly. I am tired. My blood pressure is high. I suffer from cluster headaches. Sleep fluctuates. All the classic signs of approaching burnout.
But then- it has been a bad day. And there are still better days- perhaps tomorrow…
And I am trying to do the right things to try to keep the balance towards the centre.
In the hope that the motivations that took me into social work survive, well- survive social work.
Audrey steered me towards Louis MacNeice, as I am always on the look out for great poetry.
MacNeice was born in Belfast, but spent much of his life working for the BBC in London. He was part of a group known as the ‘thirties poets’, including Auden, Spender and Day Lewis. They were united by their left-leanings.
He said this- which I very much agree with-
Poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty.
Here is one of his poems which I love, entitled ‘Prayer before birth’-
I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me.
I am not yet born, console me. I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
I am not yet born; provide me With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me.
I am not yet born; forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly and the desert calls me to doom and the beggar refuses my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.
I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me.
A man whose difficult childhood turned him into himself- into his own imagination. A difficult, mercurial man, born into extraordinary times. An intelligent man, with a precious gift.
A man who was to die three days after the D day landings, but whose poetry remains as a means of communicating the nature and horror of war.
Here is one of his poems, entitled ‘How to Kill’
Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches
Aoradh are planning a massed sky lantern launch on the banks of the river Clyde as a way of celebrating the season of Advent.
In doing this, we pray that we can learn how to wait in hope for the coming of light into darkness.
This is a repeat of an event we did last year- some photos of which are here.
We will be using lanterns made from 100% biodegradable materials- with no wire that can be of potential risk to any animals.
We will be selling the lanterns at a local shop, and making others available free for schools and community groups. And profit will go to a Christmas charity.
Here is the poster-
If you are fairly local it is well worth coming to join us- the spectacle is wonderful.
And the process of making prayers that float upwards is very moving.
This is the blurb that we include with the lanterns-
The light keeps shining in the darkness, and the darkness can never put it out…
As part of our Advent festivities, Aoradh invite you to be part of a celebration of light.
Each year, we are plunged into a whirl of busyness around Christmas- all the presents we buy, the cards we send, the pressure of making ready for a feast. All these things are good, but it is so easy to lose sight of the Christ-child. We wanted to encourage one another to step aside, and reflect…
Our intention is to use these paper sky lantern as carriers of our hopes, expectations and prayers in this season of waiting, and so make our deliberate preparation for the coming Christmas.
You are invited to write prayers and thoughts on the lantern, and to be part of a MASS SKY LANTERN LAUNCH from the West Bay Dunoon, on Sunday the 12th of December, from 5.00 pm– weather permitting.
(NB We will need fairly calm, dry conditions for the mass launch to take place. If we are not able to launch on the Sunday, then we will go for 5.00 on Monday- then Tuesday and so on.)
The spectacle of a large number of sky lanterns rising over the Clyde together is something that we hope will live in our memories, as a visual reminder of the rising possibility of hope.
And of light flickering in the darkness…
Be careful as you write on the lanterns- they are fragile!
There was an interesting discussion on the radio a few days ago about war poetry, during which the question was asked again about why the voices of the Sasoon, Brooke and Owen are so powerful and evocative even so many years (and so many wars) later.
They capture for us the humanity and inhumanity of war in language so vivid and immediate that it resonates still.
But what of the war poets since? Can you name one? What poems told the story of the second world war, or the countless ones since? How many names can you bring to mind?
I read some poetry, but I can name none.
Perhaps this is because the voices of the world war poets bring something to us of a different time, when gentlemen went to war and discovered that there was nothing gentlemanly about industrial slaughter. A time when poetry was at the centre of literature and the arts, and when other forms of media were limited and closely managed.
Wars since then have increasingly been media events. Propaganda became as important as bullets, and image is all.
I wonder, in our mad information overloaded world, if the modern day equivalent of the poetry of Owen and Sasoon is the website Wikileaks.
But I am a poet (if that does not sound too pompous!)
So as we approach another remembrance day, here is a poem about war, and a poem hoping for peace-
A time for war
There is a time for all things under heaven
.
A time to dig trenches and put up barbed wire
Then run to our deaths into withering fire
A time for mass graves, for mums to wear black
Time to kill and to maim- a time to attack
.
A time to dehumanise, a time to breed hate
A time to decide the whole nations fate
A time when all truth is wrapped up in lies
For secret policemen and neighbourhood spies
.
A time to manipulate the news and the media
A time of unassailable powerful leaders
A time of expedient centralised power
Cometh the man in this our dark hour
.
A time for Guantanamo, a time for Auschwitz
A time of gas chambers and motherless kids
A time to throw rocks and let loose the rockets
A time for dead eyes fixed in dead sockets
.
A time for insurgents, a time to suppress
To disappear dissidents, and people oppress
Of brave freedom fighters and terrorist cells
A time for Robin Hoods and William Tells
.
In some foreign field or in our back yard
In red sucking mud or ground frozen hard
Lie the bones of our children who answered the call
Now glorious dead with their names on a wall
.
A time to break up and time to destroy
A time to make men of every small boy
Over by Christmas or just a bit more
Now is the time for us to make war
A time for peace
There is a time for all things under heaven.
.
There must come a time when canons will fall silent
And men start again to look beyond the battlements
Into the scarred and empty fields
Seeded still with land mines
.
There is a time to strike the white flags of surrender
And put away the banners of victory
A time when triumphalism
No longer seems to honour
The broken bodies
And the freshly dug graves
.
There must also come a time when displaced people
Dare to step beyond the bounds of the refugee camp
And walk the long road home
.
Surely too the day will come when guns will be melted into garden forks
And tanks will pull the plough
A time for doves instead of hawks
And lions to learn care for the cows
.
A time will come too when borders are open
And bitterness and hate are eroded by the resilience of a new generation
My hands are sore this week- lots of shaping and cutting and shaving- and I am more used to soft office work. Repetitive strain injury has nothing on vibration white finger.
The writer appreciated people who make things with their hands, even if they are not very bright.
So- for craftspeople everywhere-
With what wisdom shall he be furnished that holdeth the plough, and that glorieth in the goad, that driveth the oxen therewith, and is occupied in their labours, and his whole talk is about the offspring of bulls?
He shall give his mind to turn up furrows, and his care is to give the kine fodder.
So every craftsman and workmaster that laboureth night and day, he who maketh graven seals, and by his continual diligence varieth the figure: he shall give his mind to the resemblance of the picture, and by his watching shall finish the work.
So doth the smith sitting by the anvil and considering the iron work. The vapour of the fire wasteth his flesh, and he fighteth with the heat of the furnace.
The noise of the hammer is always in his ears, and his eye is upon the pattern of the vessel he maketh.
He setteth his mind to finish his work, and his watching to polish them to perfection.
So doth the potter sitting at his work, turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always carefully set to his work, and maketh all his work by number:
He fashioneth the clay with his arm, and boweth down his strength before his feet:
He shall give his mind to finish the glazing, and his watching to make clean the furnace.
All these trust to their hands, and every one is wise in his own art.
Without these a city is not built.
And they shall not dwell, nor walk about therein, and they shall not go up into the assembly.
Upon the judges’ seat they shall not sit, and the ordinance of judgment they shall not understand, neither shall they declare discipline and judgment, and they shall not be found where parables are spoken:
But they shall strengthen the state of the world, and their prayer shall be in the work of their craft, applying their soul, and searching in the law of the most High.
this fragile tent 