Wicked and wild.

Every time I try and order my thoughts with regard to the debacle currently playing out in British Politics I feel physically sick. My stomach tenses into knots and the brain fires off in a million different directions. It's not something I am proud of and it is making me feel rather old and feeble. I wonder why I still care so much? After all I left the UK 8 years ago and haven't even been back to visit for the past 6...

Maybe a hard dose of realism will do the trick for UK residents. A Lib Lab pact can only hasten the financial social and economic meltdown that lurks in the wings. I have just read a book, Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky. In 1941 she sat down to write a book that would convey the magnitude of what she was living through by evoking the domestic lives and personal trials of the ordinary citizens of France. Her death, in Auschwitz, in 1942 meant that she never saw the day when, 65 years later, her manuscript was published.

Her all too vivid description of the breakdown of society, morals and charity is terrifying in it's exploration of the general public's inability to recognise what is happening around them. In denial until it was too late to flee. What a terrible price they paid.

Coupled with that I have also just finished 'Mukiwa, A white boy in Africa' by Peter Godwin. Growing up in Rhodesia in the 1960's his memoir of those terrible years is both an adventure story and a portrait of a bitter moral dilemma. The very ordinariness of his tale frightens me in it's awfulness.

The world can be a wicked place....

So thinking of my own life and experiences I was mulling over the story of the British family rescued over the weekend in the South Atlantic after hitting an iceberg. It seems to me that it is so important to not be in the wrong place at the wrong time! Something we got badly wrong last year by trying to remain out cruising during the hurricane season. Day 1 hit by lightning. Sometimes you gotta listen to what Mother Nature is trying to tell you. I'm listening Mother!!